Go Ask Alice

I had three grandmothers, and none of them could cook.

My mother’s mother didn’t cook because she had better things to do. She was, as Mom proudly told everyone she happened to meet, an impresario.

My father’s mother didn’t cook because she was, until Hitler intervened, a very rich woman.

And Aunt Birdie didn’t cook because she had Alice.

Aunt Birdie wasn’t really related to me; she was my father’s first wife’s mother. But she desperately wanted to be a grandmother, so when I was born, she went to the hospital, introduced herself to my mother and applied for the job. She was well past 80, and this looked like her last chance.

Mom was happy to take any help she could get, and Aunt Birdie threw herself into her work. About once a week I would walk out of school to find her waiting on the sidewalk. My friends instantly surrounded her, enchanted by standing next to a grown-up who was just their size. At 4 feet, 8 inches tall, Aunt Birdie was the smallest grown-up any of us had ever seen, and when she said to me, “Let’s go to Schrafft’s!” there was a general moan. Everybody envied me.

We always ordered the same thing: chocolate-marshmallow sundaes. We ate these slowly, watching the women ascend the restaurant’s wide, dramatic stairway and commenting on their clothes, their hair, the way they walked. Aunt Birdie always acted as if I were the world’s most fascinating person. I wondered if she had been this way with her daughter, the one my father had once been married to, but each time I said the name “Hortense,” she pretended not to hear me. Just like everybody else.

Afterward, Aunt Birdie always took me back to her house. After the long bus ride, I’d run into the kitchen, throw my arms around Alice and beg her to let me roll the dough for the apple dumplings she made every time I slept over.

“Well, now,” she always said in the soft Barbados accent she had retained after 60 years in America, patting me with her floury hands. She was a handsome old woman with brown skin, short black hair and a deeply wrinkled face. She smelled like starch, lemons and, if she was baking, cinnamon.

I loved helping her, loved feeling the fresh buttery pastry beneath my hands, loved the clean way the core came out of the apples. I loved carefully wrapping each apple in a square of pastry and pinching the top shut, just so. We’d arrange the dumplings on a baking sheet, Alice would put them in the oven, and we’d both go into the living room to watch “The Perry Como Show.” This was a big thrill too; my parents didn’t own a television.

Alice always left as soon as the show was over. Then Aunt Birdie and I ate whatever she had left simmering on the stove for supper.

On Saturday mornings we ate the remaining apple dumplings. We brushed our teeth. We made our beds. And then we went into the kitchen to make potato salad for my father. It was the only thing Aunt Birdie ever cooked. “Alice is the cook in our family,” she said.

My mother would have pointed out that Alice was not really in Aunt Birdie’s family. She did not consider herself a particularly prejudiced person, and she often pointed out that she and Dad were married by a black minister. “He was the husband of Dorothy Maynard, the singer,” she’d go on, bragging about the beautiful music.

But I had noticed that, with the exception of celebrities, Mom’s world was entirely white and that she referred to whichever brown-skinned woman who happened to be cleaning our house as “the girl.”

Dad was different: He was totally without prejudice, a fact he attributed to having been brought up a Jew in Germany. He understood Alice’s position perfectly.

And so each time Aunt Birdie handed him the jar of potato salad, he would fold his tall frame until he could reach her cheek, kiss it and say gently, “Alice is a fabulous cook. But you make the world’s best potato salad.”

*

When I was 6, my parents went to Europe for a month. As usual, it was my mother’s idea. I think that even then I knew that my father was not eager to leave me for such a long time but that he didn’t know how to say so to my mother. Especially when she had gone to the trouble of arranging for the Sol Hurok of Cleveland to come and care for me.

That was her mother, the impresario. “You’ll have a wonderful time with Nanny,” Mom assured me, taking me around the apartment and pointing out all the signed pictures of my grandmother’s famous friends. “You’ll meet Menuhin and Rubinstein!”

But the music bored me, and I bored Nanny. Three days after my parents left, she called Aunt Birdie.

This did not make me miserable. I had Aunt Birdie. I had Alice. And I had a whole month to try to solve the mystery of Hortense. Why wouldn’t anyone talk about my father’s first wife?

Aunt Birdie lived in Washington Heights, a neighborhood that had, she said, “gone downhill.” What that meant was that the streets were strewn with trash and broken glass and half the time the elevator didn’t work.

Aunt Birdie seemed oblivious to all of that; she and Uncle Perry had moved to the neighborhood a million years ago when it was fashionable. Then the stock market crashed and they got stuck. She stayed on, even after Uncle Perry died, surrounded by the beautiful objects of better times. The neighborhood was a slum, but the apartment was splendid, filled with dark mahogany chests, soft old sofas and a jumble of drawings and paintings. It was always spotless. This was because Alice angrily chased every speck of dust as if it were an invader.

“I think Alice was the first Negro my mother ever hired,” said Aunt Birdie. “A lot of colored people came north after the Civil War, but in those days my mother hired Irish girls right off the boats. Sometimes she would take me down to the docks when she was looking for maids. I liked that. When Uncle Perry asked me to marry him, my mother said she would train a maid. Naturally I expected another Irish girl. I was so surprised when Alice appeared.”

“I remember your face,” said Alice. “You opened the door and you jumped back a step when you saw me. I thought my job was ended before it could start.”

“Well I did try to fire you,” said Aunt Birdie. “Once.”

“I remember,” said Alice with a certain asperity. “But I wouldn’t let you.” She turned to me and I watched the strong lines that etched deeply into each side of her face move farther apart as her mouth turned down; suddenly she looked just like the drawing on the wall above her head. “It was right after the crash. Your Uncle Perry came home one night looking really beat, and I knew that it had happened to him. It was happening all around us, good men getting up rich and going to bed poor. He called your Aunt Birdie into the living room, and she went out and closed the door. When she came back, I could see that she had been crying.”

“Where was Hortense?” I asked.

“I told her,” said Aunt Birdie, picking up the narrative, “that we were going to be really poor. That we had nothing left. And that we couldn’t afford to keep her anymore.”

“And I told her,” said Alice, “that I was not leaving. She was not going to get rid of me so easily!”

“ ‘But Alice,’ I said,” continued Aunt Birdie, “ ‘we have no money. Nothing.’ And do you know what Alice said?”

I looked at Alice.

“I said, ‘You just pay me what you can. I know you’ll be fair.’ ”

“And do you know what she did next?” asked Aunt Birdie.

“Made a batch of apple dumplings with hard sauce,” I said. Because that is what Alice always did when an occasion called for a response but she wasn’t quite sure what it should be.

*

Alice would have snickered derisively at the notion, but she was the first person I ever met who understood the power of cooking. She was a great cook, but she cooked more for herself than for other people, not because she was hungry but because she was comforted by the rituals of the kitchen.

It never occurred to her that others might feel differently, and I was grown before I realized that not every 6-year-old would consider it a treat to spend entire afternoons in the kitchen.

Most mornings I spent in Aunt Birdie’s big, perfectly ordered closet trying on one navy blue dress after another. By the time I was 6, her Size 2 shoes actually fit me. Afterward I might walk around the apartment examining the etchings, watercolors and drawings on the walls. They were all so familiar: Alice, Aunt Birdie, the silver teapot in the living room. But inevitably there came a time when Aunt Birdie sighed and said, “Why don’t you go see what Alice is doing?”

Alice and Aunt Birdie had the easy relationship of two people who have been deeply disappointed by life but not by each other. An accident of fate had thrown them together for the better part of 60 years, but they had given it so little thought that Alice looked surprised when I asked if she liked Aunt Birdie.

She was mixing spices to make meatloaf, but she stopped in mid-motion like a rabbit when it sees a car. Her eyes opened wide. She picked up the meat, gave it a good pat and then nodded her head. “Yes,” she said, “I do.” She sounded surprised.

That night as Alice and Aunt Birdie were setting the table for dinner, Alice said, quite casually, “It’s not so easy caring for a 6-year-old when you’re in your 80s.” She gave Aunt Birdie a sidelong glance and said, “I think I’ll just go home and get a few things. I’m going to stay here until Ruthie leaves.”

“Wait until after dinner,” Aunt Birdie replied, setting a third place at the table. Alice and I had spent a lot of time in the kitchen together, but that was the first time we ever sat down to share a meal.

When we had finished eating, Aunt Birdie and I did the dishes while Alice went to get her clothing. Then Aunt Birdie let me stay up to watch “The Honeymooners.” I was still awake when Alice slid into the bed next to mine.

“Did you live here when Hortense was little?” I asked.

“Shh,” she said. “Go to sleep.”

In the morning we slipped out quietly, trying hard not to wake Aunt Birdie. We walked down 168th Street to Broadway, where Alice moved regally through the stores, pinching fruit and asking questions. Trolling in her wake I began to see the status conferred by caring about food: Alice wanted to know about everything she bought. “Where did it come from?” she asked. “When did it come in?”

As I tried to mimic her serious and disapproving face, I must have looked funny. A sturdy child with a round face surrounded by unruly brown curls, I was usually dressed in mismatched hand-me-downs; my mother did all her shopping at Loehman’s, which did not have a children’s department.

“That Hortense’s child?” asked the man who sold us grapes. Alice shook her head and gave him a dirty look.

I recognized Georgie, the butcher, right away; there was an etching of him in the kitchen, wearing the same white cap and anxious look he had now as he held out one piece of meat and then another for Alice to inspect. As she peered suspiciously at the deep red, marbled meat, he seemed to hold his breath a little. “I wouldn’t dare give her anything but the best,” he said, wrapping the chosen sirloin with one hand and slipping me a slice of bologna with the other.

When we had everything we needed, Alice took me to the Puerto Rican coffee shop, where she had a small, strong cup of coffee and I had a guava-and-cream cheese pastry.

“When I get back to Barbados,” said Alice, “I’ll sit in the sun every day and drink coffee.” She told me about the home she was planning to buy when she retired, talking as if it were still far off in the future.

“But you’re so old!” I blurted out.

She nodded, unoffended. “Hope never hurt anyone,” she replied.

Later in the day, Aunt Birdie and I walked in and out of the same stores, picking up the tidbits that Alice had forgotten. I noticed that Georgie did not stand to attention looking anxious and respectful as he did with Alice. In fact, he gave her a wink, and when he handed me a slice of bologna, she got one too. As she ate it she asked, “Did I ever tell you about the time your Uncle Perry and I took a steamer up the Hudson and the conductor sold him a half-price ticket for me? I was a married lady!”

Anybody else would have been disappointed to be such a puny specimen, but Aunt Birdie reveled in her size. Even when she was an old lady, people treated her as if she were an adorable little girl. Everybody loved her.

When we got home, Aunt Birdie got out the photo album to show me pictures of the trip up the Hudson. There they were, she and Uncle Perry, looking over the rail and smiling. I flipped the pages, searching for traces of Hortense, but there were no little girls. Instead I found a formal portrait of stiff people posing in ancient clothes.

“That’s my wedding!” said Aunt Birdie, coming to join me on the sofa. “Doesn’t Uncle Perry look handsome?” She ran her hand lovingly across the page, then turned it. “And here’s the menu,” she said, looking at a long document covered with writing.

She began to read: “Green turtle soup. Fried oysters. Salmon with lobster sauce. Roast capons. Filet of beef. Chicken croquettes. Sweetbreads. Dressed salad. Oysters on the shell.”

“Did everybody get everything?” I asked, unable to believe the lavishness of the spread. Aunt Birdie nodded and said, “People ate more then.”

“Have you ever made green turtle soup?” I asked Alice as she sliced the bread for our cold meatloaf sandwiches.

“Of course,” she said disdainfully. “It’s nothing.”

“Alice used to make the most wonderful fried oysters!” said Aunt Birdie.

“Yes,” replied Alice. “I did. I made them when your father and Hortense were married.” Her voice caressed the words “your father,” as they always did; in Aunt Birdie’s household, my father was a prince.

As Alice set the sandwiches on the table, she folded her hands and said, “There are three secrets to a good fried oyster. First you have to open the oysters and let them drain for at least an hour to make sure they are dry. Then you have to use fresh bread crumbs. But most important”--she stopped here for emphasis--”is to get the Crisco really, really hot. It has to smoke or the oysters won’t be crisp. Should we make some this afternoon?”

After we had pried the oysters open and left them to drain, she coated them with pulverized crackers. We set up an assembly line: Aunt Birdie dipped the oysters into a beaten egg and I dropped them into the freshly grated bread crumbs. Then I handed the gooey packages to Alice, who threw them into the fat and hovered over them, watching until they had turned the required shade of brown. It took about a minute, then she scooped them out and plunked them onto the torn brown paper bags with which she had lined the counters.

“Eat it now!” she commanded. I picked one up, but it was so hot it burned my fingers and I dropped it. Alice looked impatient, so I picked it up again. It was crisp and soft on the outside, with a faint sweetness. Inside, the oyster was like a briny pudding. I took one bite and then another, savoring the crispness of the crust and the softness of the interior. Alice and Aunt Birdie looked at my face and laughed.

As the days went on, this became my favorite game. Each day I picked a different dish from Aunt Birdie’s wedding menu and Aunt Birdie and I went into the kitchen and begged Alice to make it.

“Will she know how?” I asked again and again. The reply was always the same: “Alice can make anything.”

“Six-year-olds are so much work,” grumbled Alice one day as we waited for bread dough to rise. “It’s a good lucky thing I have so much patience.”

“Was Hortense a lot of work when she was little?” I asked.

“No,” replied Alice, “she was an angel. She spent all her time drawing and painting. You know, all these pictures are hers.” With her chin she indicated the drawing of her, the etching of Georgie, the photographs in the living room, the watercolors. “Everybody said she was such a talented artist; the lessons she had!” Then Alice punched the dough, hard, and it deflated, collapsing with a poof. “But she grew up.”

“Yes,” I said brightly, “and married my father!”

“He married two of them . . . ,” said Alice, and then stopped herself. She shut her lips tightly and refused to say another word. Two of what? I wondered. It sounded as if she meant more than just two women. I was glad when the phone rang.

It was my Cleveland grandmother, checking in. “Oh, Nanny,” I said, “we’re cooking. Alice can make anything.”

“Ask her if she can make chicken croquettes,” said Nanny.

“Does she think I can’t?” said Alice, her eyes flashing. She unleashed a few choice words about women who not only couldn’t cook but were too busy to take care of their own grandchildren. Then she said, “Get your coat on, we’re going shopping.” She muttered all the way to the store.

“I need some plump chicken breasts,” she said to Georgie. “I’m making chicken croquettes tonight. This one’s fine, fancy grandmother thinks I don’t know how.”

“Aunt Birdie says Alice makes the best chicken croquettes in the world,” I said loyally. “Just like the ones that she used to eat when her father took her to Delmonico’s for lunch.”

“I’ll bet they’re even better,” said Georgie.

Alice smiled. “I’ll bring you one,” she offered, as if she were a queen bestowing a rare gift on a subject.

Alice poached the chicken breasts very lightly, and after they had cooled, I pulled the meat from the bones and Alice chopped it. She let me stand on a chair and stir the thick bechamel made entirely of cream. She seasoned it with minced onion, salt, cayenne pepper and mace and stirred in the chicken. Then we put the mixture into the refrigerator to chill and went into the living room.

When we came back, I formed the mixture into logs and Alice dipped them in cracker crumbs and fried them in butter.

We wrapped Georgie’s croquette in a linen napkin and put the rest on Aunt Birdie’s gold-rimmed porcelain platter. We poured grape juice into the best crystal, and after dinner Aunt Birdie turned up the radio and the three of us danced as if we were attending a fancy ball. “Look!” I said, pointing to one of the drawings on the living room wall, “we look just like that.” Both heads turned to the drawing. Alice said, “My, how Hortense loved to dance!” Aunt Birdie stopped in mid-step. She went over to the sofa and sat down. The dancing was over.

*

The next night my parents came back from Europe. Alice was making roast beef, mashed potatoes, spinach and creamed onions to celebrate their return. “They’ll appreciate it after all that fancy French food,” she said, opening the oven to baste the meat. I took a deep breath, inhaling the richness of the roasting meat and the sweetness of the onions.

“I bet they never ate anything this good in Paris,” I said.

Alice smiled. “Hortense always said your father was a man who appreciated meat and potatoes,” she said with a smile that showed how much she liked my father.

“How did she die?” I asked, trying to sound casual. Alice just stopped and stared at me. “What makes you think she’s dead?” she replied.

“Isn’t she?” I asked.

“Might as well be,” said Alice. “Are you sure all that spinach is really clean?”

The dinner was a big success. Aunt Birdie opened a narrow green bottle of wine and my parents drank it all. My mother gave Aunt Birdie a cashmere sweater. My father devoured the creamed spinach; he gave Alice a silk shawl and told her that she could still make a better meal than any restaurant in Paris.

That reminded me of what Alice had said. As my father carried me down to the taxi cab, I murmured into his neck, “What happened to Hortense?”

“I’ll tell you in the morning,” he said. But by morning he had changed his mind. I decided she must have done something really terrible. Maybe she had killed someone. Maybe she was in jail.

It was years before I found out the truth. By then I was in college and Aunt Birdie, by dint of sheer longevity, had unexpectedly become an heiress. When she was in her late 90s, the last of Uncle Perry’s seven bachelor brothers died, leaving his considerable fortune to her.

The first thing Aunt Birdie did was move into a good neighborhood. The second was buy Alice a house in Barbados.

“Wouldn’t Alice rather come live here with you?” I asked. Aunt Birdie seemed to think the question was ridiculous. “She’s always wanted to go home,” she said. Still, every time I went to visit Aunt Birdie, the first thing she asked was, “Have you heard from Alice?”

I had. I could tell from the tone of her letters that she was disappointed with the dream that had finally come true. I think she missed Aunt Birdie. I know Aunt Birdie missed her. But neither of them could admit it.

“Take good care of your Aunt Birdie,” Alice wrote, sending me the recipe for her apple dumplings. And she told me, finally, where Hortense had been all those years: in a mental institution.

“That’s it?” I asked my father. “That’s the mystery? That’s all there is to it? She’s in a mental institution?”

“Yes,” he said slowly. “Silly, isn’t it?”

“But why wouldn’t anybody talk about her?” I asked.

He looked down at me and said simply, “They were ashamed.” He looked sad and added, “There was something else too. They thought it was their fault that she was so frightened. As her illness progressed, she became unable to touch anything that had ever been touched by another person, and they felt that they had somehow done something wrong.”

I looked back, picturing that warm, crowded apartment, trying to imagine how those two sweet ladies could have hurt anyone. I pictured the three of us in the kitchen. And I heard Alice saying, once again, “He married two of them.” Suddenly I understood: Crazy women.

“Do you think they were to blame for her illness?” I asked.

“Well,” he answered slowly, “they certainly didn’t prepare her for the real world.”

AUNT BIRDIE’S POTATO SALAD

3 pounds small boiling potatoes

Salt, pepper

1 tablespoon sugar

2 onions, sliced

1/3 cup oil

1/2 cup white vinegar

2 tablespoons water

Boil potatoes in water to cover until just tender, 15 to 20 minutes. Drain and let cool slightly. Peel and slice into even rounds about 1/2 inch thick.

Season with salt and pepper to taste and sprinkle on sugar. Add onions. Add oil and mix gently.

Dilute vinegar with water and bring to boil in small saucepan. Add to potato mixture while hot and mix well.

6 to 8 servings. Each serving:

291 calories; 63 mg sodium; 0 cholesterol; 13 grams fat; 43 grams carbohydrates; 5 grams protein; 1.04 grams fiber.

ALICE’S APPLE DUMPLINGS WITH HARD SAUCE

HARD SAUCE

3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter at room temperature

1 1/2 cups sugar

Dash salt

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

DUMPLINGS

2 cups flour

1 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup shortening

1/4 cup ice water

5 apples, peeled and cored

1/4 cup sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 tablespoon butter

Hard sauce, I discovered much later, is usually made with liquor (hence its name) and powdered sugar. I don’t know if Alice added brandy when I was not around, but the recipe she gave me certainly did not include it. As for the sugar, I always thought the best thing about hard sauce was the way it melted on the hot dumplings, leaving just the faintest trace of sugar on your tongue. Use powdered sugar and you lose that effect.

HARD SAUCE

Beat butter until creamy and soft. Gradually add sugar and salt and continue beating until creamy and light. Beat in vanilla. Chill. Makes about 1 cup.

DUMPLINGS

Mix flour and salt. Cut in shortening with two knives until shortening is size of peas. Add water slowly until you can gather dough into ball with fork.

Roll out dough 1/4 inch thick and cut into 5 (6x6-inch) squares. (You may have to gather dough scraps and roll out again to make fifth square.) Put apple in center of each square.

Mix sugar and cinnamon. Fill center of each apple with sugar mixture. Put dab of butter on top of each. Bring pastry up around apple to make package that completely covers apple. Dab edges with bit of water if necessary to seal. Chill 30 minutes.

Bake at 350 degrees until apples are tender, about 40 minutes. Serve warm with hard sauce.

5 servings. Each serving:

1,052 calories; 825 mg sodium; 98 mg cholesterol; 62 grams fat; 124 grams carbohydrates; 5 grams protein; 0.83 gram fiber.

ALICE’S OYSTERS

12 oysters

Salt

1/2 cup cracker crumbs (about 15 crackers)

1 egg

2 tablespoons oyster juice

Pepper

Oil or shortening

1 cup fresh bread crumbs

Lemons, cut in eighths

Open oysters. Sprinkle with salt to taste and let stand in colander to dry out, 1 hour. Reserve 2 tablespoons of liquid from oysters.

Coat thoroughly with cracker crumbs and let dry 10 minutes.

Beat egg with oyster juice and pepper to taste. Set aside.

Heat oil 3 inches deep in deep skillet to 365 degrees. Dip oysters in egg mixture, then in bread crumbs. Throw into hot fat, 2 at a time, and cook until brown, about 1 minute.

Sprinkle with lemon juice and eat immediately.

12 oysters. Each oyster:

49 calories; 271 mg sodium; 26 mg cholesterol; 2 grams fat; 5 grams carbohydrates; 2 grams protein; 0.02 gram fiber.