Sarah Phillips by Andrea Lee (beach books .TXT) 📗

a red-brick house with marble steps in South Philadelphia. They all played the piano, knew a bit of French and yards of Wordsworth, and expected to become social workers, elementary-school teachers, or simply good wives to suitable young men from their own background—sober young doctors, clergymen, and postal administrators, not too dark of complexion. Gracie Renfrew fit the pattern, but at the same time dismayed her family by attending Communist Party meetings, joining a theater group, and going off to a Quaker work camp.

When she married my father, the prescribed young minister, my mother had become, inevitably, a schoolteacher—a beautiful one. She was full-faced, full-bodied, with an indestructible olive skin and an extraordinary forehead—high, with two handsome hollows over the temples. She had a bright, perverse gaze, accentuated by a slight squint in her left eye, and a quite unusual physical strength. She swam miles every summer at the swim club, and at the small Quaker school, where I was a student and she taught sixth grade, it was common to see her jumping rope with the girls, her large bosom bobbing and a triumphant, rather disdainful smile on her face. Her pupils adored her, probably because her nature held a touch of the barbarism that all children admire: she would quell misbehavior, for instance, by threatening in a soft, convincing voice to pull off the erring student’s ears and fry them for supper.

At home Mama was a housekeeper in the grand old style that disdains convenience, worships thrift, and condones extravagance only in the form of massive Sunday dinners, which, like acts of God, leave family members stunned and reeling. Her kitchen, a long, dark, inconvenient room joined to a crooked pantry, was entirely unlike the cheerful kitchens I saw on television, where mothers who looked like June Cleaver unwrapped food done up in cellophane. This kitchen had more the feeling of a workshop, a laboratory in which the imperfect riches of nature were investigated and finally transformed into something near sublimity. The sink and stove were cluttered with works in progress: hot plum jelly dripping into a bowl through cheesecloth; chocolate syrup bubbling in a saucepan; string beans and ham bones hissing in the pressure cooker; cooling rice puddings flavored with almond and vanilla; cooked apples waiting to be forced through a sieve to make applesauce; in a vat, a brownish, aromatic mix for root beer.

The instruments my mother used were a motley assemblage of blackened cast-iron pots, rusty-handled beaters, graters, strainers, and an array of mixing bowls that included the cheapest plastic variety as well as tall, archaic-looking stoneware tubs inherited from my grandmother, who had herself been a legendary cook. Mama guarded these ugly tools with jealous solicitude, suspicious of any new introductions, and she moved in her kitchen with the modest agility of a master craftsman.

Like any genuine passion, her love of food embraced every aspect of the subject. She read cookbooks like novels, and made a businesslike note in her appointment book of the date that Wanamaker’s received its yearly shipment of chocolate-covered strawberries. Matthew and I learned from her a sort of culinary history of her side of the family: our grandfather, for instance, always asked for calf brains scrambled with his eggs on weekend mornings before he went out hunting. Grandma Renfrew, a sharp-tongued beauty from North Carolina, loved to drink clabbered milk, and was so insistent about the purity of food that once when Aunt Lily had served her margarine instead of butter, she had refused to eat at Lily’s table again for a year. My mother’s sole memory of her mother’s mother, a Meherrin Indian called Molly, was of the withered dark-faced woman scraping an apple in the corner of the kitchen, and sucking the pulp between her toothless jaws.

Mama took most pleasure in the raw materials that became meals. She enjoyed the symmetry, the unalterable rules, and also the freaks and vagaries that nature brought to her kitchen. She showed me with equal pleasure the handsome shape of a fish backbone; the little green gallbladder in the middle of a chicken liver; and the double-yolked eggs, the triple cherries, the peculiar worm in a cob of corn. As she enjoyed most the follies, the bizarre twists of human nature and experience, so also she had a particular fondness for the odd organs and connective tissues that others disdained. “Gristle is delectable,” she would exclaim as Matthew and I groaned. “The best part of the cow!”

I was a rather lazy and dunderheaded apprentice to my mother. She could be snappish and tyrannical, but I hung around the kitchen anyway, in quest of scrapings of batter, and because I liked to listen to her. She loved words, not as my father the minister did, for their ceremonial qualities, but with an off-handed playfulness that resulted in a combination of wit and nonsense. In her mischievous brain, the broad country imagery of her Virginia-bred mother mingled with the remains of a ladylike education that had classical pretensions. When she was annoyed at Matthew and me, we were “pestilential Pestalozzis”; we were also, from time to time, as deaf as adders, as dumb as oysters, as woolly as sheep’s backs; we occasionally thrashed around like horses with the colic. At odd moments she addressed recitations to the family cat, whom she disliked; her favorite selections were versions of “O Captain! My Captain!” (“O Cat! my Cat! our fearful trip is done…”) and Cicero’s address to Catiline (“How long, Cat, will you abuse our patience?…”).

On summer evenings, after the dinner dishes had been washed and as the remains of the iced tea stood growing tepid in the pitcher, my mother, dreamy and disheveled, finally would emerge from the kitchen. “Look at me,” she’d murmur, wandering into the living room and patting her hair in the mirror over the piano. “I look like a Wild Man of Borneo.”

She would change into a pair of oxfords and take a walk with me, or with a neighbor.