Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen Read online

  Elizabeth David made me laugh out loud, as she so often does. I heard my mother's voice so often in the slightly patronizing, supremely confident, didactical sentences of her own cooking teacher. Once, when speaking to my father on the telephone, I read to him the three-sentence recipe for “Les Oeufs en Cocotte à la Crème.” After the third and last sentence—This is one of the most delicious egg dishes ever invented, but it is rare to get it properly done—my dad roared with the laughter of recognition. “That's typical,” he said. He had thought that I was reading from my mother's own recipe book.

  I followed Elizabeth David's strict instructions to chop the parsley very fine, my knife rocking backward and forward on the chopping board.

  Matty, could you get me some parsley, please?” I hear my mother say. I lift up the huge Georgian window frame overlooking the garden in Oxford Terrace, and there's the black window box full of curly parsley, whose very name makes my mouth water. I snip some sprigs and take it to her. And she chops it rapidly, automatically, with her Sabatier knife. I'm allowed to pinch some in my fingers, and its freshness fills my mouth.

  The next day one of the Australian nurses called. “Hi, Pernilla, it's Ashley from the clinic calling. Guess what your level is? It's up to 457,” she said. More than doubled in two days. On track. “We're very happy with the levels.”

  This was a serious change in tone from an organization that had clearly trained itself not to get its patients' hopes up. We began to mull over baby names. I wanted a girl—in my years of visiting war zones, I had not seen many women slaughtering children or anyone else for that matter—but I told Pernilla that I sensed it was a boy. We thought we would give a girl the middle name of Ann and a boy the middle name Jeffrey, after Pernilla's father.

  And then something changed. Pernilla's body started to show signs that something might be wrong. Her hCG level climbed to 927, but the messages her body was giving out were bad. We went for gentle walks in almost total silence, not wanting to voice panic.

  “Come in for your first scan on Tuesday,” the doctor told us that Saturday.

  Over the weekend I walked around alone through the packed streets of West London during the Notting Hill carnival, with a beer in my hand, the evening sun bronzing the dancing crowds. It was too hectic a scene for a woman trying to nurture a very new embryo. “I'd love to take my kid to this one year,” I thought, as dads carried their little girls and boys on their shoulders through the kindly, spaced-out throng, kid headphones protecting their tender eardrums from the massive reggae beats that shook your whole body. I danced to blissed-out house music in a shoulder-to-shoulder throng, then made my way home.

  On the morning of the scan I wanted to be sick. Pernilla's symptoms of wrongness had worsened, and on the phone the doctor had mentioned the words ectopic and nonviable. Usually I did not go behind the screen for the scans, remaining in my seat across from the doctor's desk. On this occasion, I waited there while Pernilla undressed, staring at the fleur-de-lis pattern on the navy-blue screen and thinking of a similar material I had once bought at a street market in Cairo. And then, because this was such a crucial examination and I wanted to be by her side so that we could both see what there was to see inside of her, I joined her behind the screen and stared at the ultrasound monitor as the doctor moved the wand. It was gray and black and fibrous in there, I could see that much. But otherwise I didn't know what I was looking at—or for. I had a vague sense that what I wanted was for the doctor to point out a small bean-shaped thing with a slight heartbeat.

  “To be honest, Pernilla,” he said, “I can't see anything.”

  “Look harder; look again,” I wanted to scream. “You can't see anything clearly on the screen, so you just need to look again.” Those hCG readings were coming from somewhere.

  “It could be ectopic,” he said, and my Internet research was enough so that I knew an ectopic pregnancy—where the embryo had attached itself to somewhere other than the wall of the uterus—would mean no baby and a threat to Pernilla's health.

  When we got back home from the clinic, there was a piece of junk mail on the floor, stuffed through the mailbox in spite of the No Junk Mail sticker I had affixed to it. I called up the pizza-delivery place and shouted at them over the phone, threatening legal action.

  The doctor called. Pernilla, already lying on our bed, answered. The hCG level later that day was just over 300. It should have been around 3,000. I sat on the floor next to the bed and held her arm as she cried. Then my body began to heave.

  A few days later, the clinic assured us that the pregnancy hadn't been ectopic. We felt a brief blip of relief, but it soon faded into sadness. A week later—a week of doing nothing and making excuses to editors—I went out with friends for lunch and drank until it was very late.

  Why do you drink so much whisky?” I ask my mother. We're in her bedroom. She's in bed. It's the early evening of an early-summer day. I am sixteen years old, and I keep hoping that alcohol will return to being something that makes my mother happy, not unconscious.

  “I just feel so sad sometimes, Matthew,” she says. “It makes the sadness go away.”

  25

  REMEMBERING, OR PROMPTING MEMORY, REQUIRES EFFORT. I had made the decision to remember, to conjure my good mother up from the past to allow her to take her rightful place alongside the terrible mother who loomed so unavoidably in my memories. I had deliberately set—even contrived—the conditions for this kitchen séance: cooking, reading her cookbooks and others of my own, exploring her past through conversations with her siblings and my sister and my father. Then I had to sit back and see what happened. And with the help of these stimuli, with my memory pores open, the glimpses of my good mother had come at unexpected moments, leaping in front of my eyes, fully formed but ethereal, needing to be put down on paper before they drifted away again.

  But there was a limit to how far I seemed to want to go. I sat for weeks and then months ignoring her own recipe book, except for the one time when I'd opened it looking for the strawberry ice cream recipe. I left family photographs unseen in their albums, home movies unplayed on DVDs, the boxes with her papers inside unopened. I made no efforts to get her medical records, to speak to her doctors, to track down key biographical details—all the kinds of basic reporting I knew how to do with my eyes closed.

  On the second morning after the doctor called Pernilla to tell us the pregnancy was over, I went back to the Farm Street church on my own and sat in the chapel of Our Lady of Lourdes, the miracle mother. I had planned to not get angry, to not ask for anything, but to thank my mother and God's mother for their efforts. But that was bullshit. It was dishonest. I was angry. And I wanted something. I was there to make an appeal, not to be meek.

  “Look, I'm not going to lie. I want a baby, okay?” I said to myself silently in the chapel. Another man, about my age, sat two yards away, unable to suppress his sobs at his own private tragedy. I wanted to put my hand on his shoulder and go to a bar with him so that we could share our problems and part later in a fraternity of hope. I looked up at the marble statue of the Virgin. “You had a kid,” I said to the graceful sculpture. “Mum, you had two. You have to help Pernilla. She just wants to be a mother too. Come on.”

  I sat around the house for two more weeks, pretending to editors and my wife and myself that I was working hard in my study. Then one day I picked up two stained silver napkin rings that had sat on a shelf in my study since my sister and I had found them in a box after our mother died. One was inscribed, on the inside, with: Matthew 2.11.69. The other was older, and on the outside were the initials JRRT. Inside, the date: 2nd Sept. 1950. John Taylor, my mother's little brother, who died of meningitis after six or seven weeks. They were christening rings, mine and my dead infant uncle's. It was time to start being a reporter again, to look at my mother's papers, her recipes, the home movies, to make some calls and piece things together. I would have to accept that some of what I would find would be painful.

  26
/>   Sandwiched between three major roads in Northwest London is an island that is home to a pub, some shops, and the Odeon Swiss Cottage movie theater. It is an early-February evening in 1943. German bombs continue to fall, ripping chunks out of London's architecture, but in these cold winter days there is some good news on the Pathé newsreel: The Germans have just surrendered in Stalingrad, a crushing defeat for Hitler and a turning point in the war that has been grinding on for nearly four years. Christian Taylor has left her only child, Jennifer, with a babysitter and is enjoying a night out with her husband, Bobby. She is gazing up at the screen when an intense ache pops up in her back and moves quickly to the front of her body. It lasts for a surprisingly long time and then the cramp fades. But it's back again soon. My grandmother has been through this before. She's about to give birth.

  “The baby's coming,” my grandmother whispers in Bobby's ear—or so goes the story that is years later passed down to my aunt Jennifer and, later still, to me.

  My grandfather is a passionate patriot. He worships Churchill, detests Hitler, and wants to be up to date on the progress of the war. “I'm not taking you out now,” he says firmly. “I'm watching the news.”

  They slip out of the Odeon after the newsreel has finished.

  Jennifer Taylor is two years and ten months old when she first sets her eyes on my mother, Ann Pauline Taylor, her new baby sister. Christian and Bobby Taylor are comfortably off, but their moderate affluence has not prevented their nanny from being called up for national service. So when Christian is about to give birth, she puts her daughter Jennifer into a children's home for two weeks.

  The day of the meeting of the sisters, Bobby picks up Jennifer from her hated children's home in a black taxi and takes her into the kitchen on the ground floor of the three-bedroom flat in the red-brick, semidetached house to see the new baby. Ann is in a Moses basket on the kitchen counter. Christian hands Jennifer a glass of milk and lifts her up so she can take her first look at her new sister. The baby has a tiny birthmark under her nostril on the right side of her face.

  Christian pushes the small navy-blue pram up the street they live on toward the nearby department store. They pass the little convent school at the end of their street, which Jennifer attends, walking to and from it with a Catholic neighbor who also goes to the school. At the rear of the department store is a door where people line up for their wartime rations—some milk, a few eggs. My grandmother and my aunt, with my mother buried under blankets in the pram, join the line.

  Sometimes, when the bombing of London is particularly heavy, Christian sends Jennifer and Ann north on the train to Edinburgh. They stay in a basement room in the Scotia Hotel, which is owned by my great-grandmother, Christian's mother, an Irishwoman named Marian McLaughlin. They call her Gaga, because they cannot pronounce Grandmother or Granny. Gaga drinks a lot and, for all her success in running the hotel in Edinburgh's smart New Town, as a member of Edinburgh's marginalized Catholic community she is generally not welcome in Protestant circles. The family's friends are nearly all Catholics.

  When they move back to Edinburgh after the war, Bobby Taylor begins to film his growing family on a movie camera. Amid the fur coats and the cigarettes and ties—rarely is an adult man seen in these home movies without a tie—my mother appears. A baby at first, she slowly grows into a grinning, pretty little girl with a gap in her upper front teeth. She often wears a ribbon in her black hair and always, in every shot, shrugs a little in her shy excitement about being filmed. There are white ankle socks and dresses and skirts, never pants. She squirms when an adult tries to hold her hand. She edges slowly into the cold North Sea on the beach at North Berwick, along the coast from Edinburgh. She grows older, and the three sisters—Jennifer, Ann, and little Kata—dance around in the garden, with my mother holding one hand behind her back, displaying the dance moves she has been studying. She leaps with her sisters and friends through a sprinkler on the lawn. At five or six, with bows in her hair, she dances on the patio of the house at Blackbarony Road, performing pas de deux and lifting the hems of the kilt she is wearing. It is the day of her First Communion, and she stands in the garden dressed like a child bride, flowers and a white lace veil draped from her crown, a white cape over her shoulders, her hands together in prayer. She is a little older, perhaps seven, and again she dances in the back garden, in a ballerina's light-blue tutu, pirouetting among the daisies on her pointed toe, curtsying formally when her routine is finished.

  My grandmother, it seems, was not entirely keen on children. In the home movies she is charismatic and stylish but not visibly affectionate to her daughters. During several summer vacations, Jennifer, my mother, and Kata are sent off to stay with cousins in Ireland. The ferry takes them from Glasgow to Derry. They spend happy, if motherless, weeks running around barefoot, with no running water, no electricity, paraffin lamps in the evenings, peat burning in the fireplace, three to a bed. One summer, my mother catches pneumonia, and my grandmother flies to Ireland to fetch her and her sisters home.

  Jennifer is in charge of her sisters for much of the time, taking them to the Catholic day school, St. Margaret's, on Edinburgh's trams or to the zoo or the skating rinks or riding stables. The nanny accompanies them at times. They play hide-and-seek and other games in the woods near their house on Blackford Hill and in the quarry nearby. They know when to be home for meals.

  My mother is showing signs of being a very bright girl, but there is nothing she loves more than ballet. She is a natural and takes endless classes until, one day, she auditions for the Royal Ballet School. This London institution is the best in Britain, the home of many of Britain's finest dancers. To gain a place at the Royal Ballet School is to be given a chance at making dancing your life.

  My mother is accepted at the age of ten. Her father decides his daughter is too young to go to boarding school in London. She is deeply disappointed and becomes, for a time, quiet and passive.

  She and Jennifer and later Kata become boarders at the Kilgraston Convent School in Perthshire, a strict place where the nuns use handheld clickers to silence the girls, to make them sit down, to make them stand up. My mother sits for a nationwide exam at the age of eleven and she achieves the highest score in Scotland. At prize-giving each year, she picks up piles of books. She graduates at sixteen and has to fill a year before she's old enough to go to university. So her parents send her and Jennifer to a Catholic, French-speaking finishing school in a convent at the top of the Spanish Steps in Rome.

  “There was duchess so and so, princess so and so, with her daughter so and so,” Jennifer recalls. “Some of them were absolutely charming. We met a very nice German girl whose father, von Stauffenberg, had been executed by Hitler during the war. He was the German who tried to … you know, von Stauffenberg. Well, his daughter was there, the duchess. They were very well connected because her aunt was married to the papal ambassador to Rome at that time, so we would go to the papal ambassador and his wife's house for swimming.”

  My mother in front of my father's sports car

  The sisters, with a good friend from Edinburgh, yawn their way through lectures in churches and museums and run around the magical city in the afternoon. It is 1960, and La Dolce Vita is in the movie theaters, so they sit in the darkness watching the impossibly handsome Marcello Mastroianni seduce his way around the city. They crane their necks at the Sistine Chapel and work on their tans on the beaches during days off. They go to the opera and a party at the British embassy to celebrate the queen's birthday. The nuns take them on a long bus tour of Naples, Capri, Assisi, Siena, Florence, Pompeii, and Pisa. They learn absolutely nothing practical or useful in the four months in which they are being polished into young ladies. It is all gelato and Italian boys and beauty.

  After finishing school is finished, Jennifer, Ann, and their friend Susie go to Venice and Bologna on their own. And then the sisters take the train to Antibes, to meet the rest of the family to water-ski and sit on the beach.

  My mother
has the idea of going to Oxford to study medicine, but her father, wanting to keep his daughters in their hometown, says no. She accepts a place at Edinburgh University and fills some more of the months before university with a second finishing school, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

  Or that was the story I heard, anyway. “I wanted to be a doctor, but your grandfather wouldn't let me,” my mother told me several times over the years.

  I am not sure now how true that is. As her illness worsened, my mother tended to blame other people for her disappointments.

  27

  WHEN I LAID THE FAUX-SNAKESKIN, MUSTY-SMELLING SUITCASE that held some of my mother's papers flat on the carpet, I guessed I would not be opening up a trove of happy mementos. That's why it had taken me over a year to look inside, I suspected. For most of my life I had kept my own memories of those years carefully packed away in some part of my brain. I knew they were there, didn't like what was in them, rarely discussed the detailed contents with friends from my early days or with family—because we all knew, we all had our own versions, we didn't ever need reminding, we wanted to forget—and when someone I had not met before asked me about my parents, I would usually end that line of inquiry with a quick answer. “My dad's a sculptor, and my mother's very mentally ill,” I would say, as if it were her chosen career, and the work colleague or the blind date and I would silently agree to move the conversation on.

  I pushed the two latches on the suitcase lock to the side and opened it up.

  On top of the pile of files, envelopes, rolled-up diplomas, and albums was a brown A4-size envelope from Penguin Books. And another from Oxford University Press. They immediately caught my eye, and since these file folders and envelopes and albums did not seem to be in any order, I just started there.