When Artie had been a teenager, Annie had learned through tough experience, that with patience, even the deepest wall of his sulky silence could be breached. So without a word she pulled a pair of pants from the one extra chair in the room, carefully hanging it in Artie’s overstuffed closet. Then she sat down.

Artie looked at her, gave a small smile, a pitiful echo of the mischievous grin he’d sported as a youngster.  “Mama, you’re not leaving until I talk to you, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay. I’ve quit college.”

She felt a surge of disappointment, dismay bordering on anger. After all the tutoring, after all the help we’ve given, after all the strings Abe pulled to get him accepted into Brooklyn College….

The anger melted into sadness — It’s not his fault. He tried, tried so hard — and the sadness was followed by a flood of anxiety — What will he do now?

Anxiety was no stranger to Annie, not when it came to Artie’s education; it was more like an unwanted companion that refused to go away, no matter how much she wanted it to. She thought about the past few years. After squeaking his way through high school with plenty of outside help, Artie had tried learning in Torah Vodaath’s beis medrash. But worn down with constant failure while others surged forward in their understanding of the Gemara, he left after less than a year. Then he’d worked in Levine’s, the department store owned by Abe’s father, for two years, but though he’d excelled with the customers, because of his dismal math skills he was constantly making mistakes at the cash register. Though Abe’s father, Sammy, would never have fired his own son’s foster child, he made his displeasure at Artie’s errors very clear.

Finally, a year before, Artie had somehow passed the examination needed to become a student at Brooklyn College. (Abe’s generous donation to the college pre-med program hadn’t hurt either….)  In his first term he managed to snag Cs and the occasional B — and one shining A in freshman comp — but this term had been a disaster.

Annie forced herself to sit quietly. Now was not the time for speeches, for recriminations, or even for searching for solutions. Now was the time to let Artie’s silence grow so large that somehow it would need a way to escape.

Within minutes, it did.

Artie picked up the paper he’d been writing on and handed it to Annie. “It’s a song I’m writing,” he said, in a voice that was almost a whisper. “Please, understand.”

Annie looked at the handwritten words:

I wander on life’s twisting ride,

Always failure, seldom pride.

Orphaned by a cruel decree,

Raised in love, but never free.

An aching heart, a “mum” unseen,

Yearning to find where I should have been.

Shadows wreathed in mystery,

Raised in love, but never free.

And suddenly Annie was crying, sobbing for a little lost boy, while Artie picked up his guitar and strummed a melancholy tune.

“HE

wants to take some time off, Abe,” Annie said. It was close to 11 p.m., but Annie, as always, had been waiting for her husband to come home.

Abe took a long, appreciative sip of the boiling-hot coffee his wife had poured for him. Just as he liked it: no sugar, no milk, only the bitter delight of caffeine.

“Abie, I always thought he felt like part of the family, that it didn’t matter that I didn’t give birth to him. But I guess it did matter, to him. And he’s had such a hard time all these years in school, always failing while Mutty” — a small smile lit up her tired face — “our Mutty was always such a success. Abe, he needs space to figure his future out. He needs love and our understanding and patience.”

“What Artie needs,” said Abie, putting down the coffee cup with a bang, “is a job.”

“N

ow let’s get the pierogen started, Marjorie.”

“Pierogen? What’s that?”

“Delicious. We make a dough and fill it with—”

“Don’t tell me. With potatoes and fried onions.”

Perele Schwartz put down the onion she’d been about to dice and grinned. “That’s right. How did you guess?”

Marjorie’s lips turned up into something that was half-smile and half-sulk. “Because everything, EVERYTHING, we cook here is potatoes and onions. Potato knishes. Potato soup. Potato latkes. And now potato piro-whatever-they-are.”

Perele resumed dicing. “Look, dear, this isn’t just any meal we’re preparing. Mrs. Horn is getting married, and I want to serve all her favorite dishes. Though she’s been in this country for many years, she was born and raised in Russia, where she ate kartofel. That’s potatoes in Russian.”

Marjorie gave a little shiver. “What a horrible country that is. With their spies and their cold war and their—”

Perele laughed. “And their potatoes. So let’s start peeling.”

As she expertly wielded her knife, Marjorie couldn’t help but compare Mrs. Schwartz to Madame, the fierce woman who had shared the secrets of haute cuisine in a cooking class Marjorie had taken together with her mother one summer. Madame was prone to temper tantrums if she saw a stain on a starched white apron, or if an egg was not delicately cracked in its exact center. There would be screams in rapid French and the occasional upraised ladle or serving fork. Though Marjorie’s mother had spent most of the time socializing with the  other middle-aged women in the course, Marjorie had taken it very seriously, and after eight weekly classes she could serve up a Soufflé aux Framboises that would even get Madame’s grudging approval.

When she’d volunteered to help Mrs. Schwartz in the kitchen she’d hoped to use her cooking skills to whip up gourmet French cuisine. But though with Mrs. Horn’s upcoming wedding there was plenty to do — it seemed like every immigrant and Holocaust survivor in New York City would be coming to rejoice with the cook, who’d served up hundreds of thousands of meals over her 40-year career — there certainly wasn’t much in the way of haute cuisine going on in this spotless kitchen. Though the latkes had been fried to oily perfection and the potato soup was thick, rich, and creamy, it was far, far away from boeuf bourguignon or sole meunière.

But if Perele Schwartz’s culinary vision was more limited than Madame’s, her personality was a lot more pleasant. She patiently explained to Marjorie how to keep milk and meat separate (an odd practice, Marjorie felt, but a small price to pay for the privilege of living in the hotel). She would sympathize when Marjorie complained about her unfair math professor or her boring life. Marjorie didn’t know much about her; only that she was a widow whose nine-year-old son Yanky liked to hang around the kitchen after coming back from school, sampling all the food. She spoke English well, but with a trace of an accent.

Oh yes, and she liked potatoes.

IT

was while sampling the pierogen (delicious, Marjorie thought grudgingly) that she had her brainstorm.

“Mrs. Schwartz, what are we doing about dessert?”

Perele took a break from cleaning chickens. “We don’t have time to do anything too fancy. Kokosh is Mrs. Horn’s favorite. And maybe a Jello mold and fruit cups.”

“That’s all?”

“Darling, we have three more days to cook for more than one hundred guests.” Her face took on a wistful mien. “If I had the time, I could make a Dobos torte that would taste like Gan Eden.”

Though Marjorie had no idea of where or what Gan Eden was (maybe a good restaurant?) she pounced on the other unintelligible words. “What’s that?”

“An elegant dessert from my home country, Hungary.”

So Mrs. Schwartz was Hungarian. Filing that interesting fact into her brain, Marjorie switched on her most persuasive voice.

“Please, please, Mrs. Schwartz, let me make something for dessert. I mean, Mrs. Horn is the bride and she’s great, but there will be so many guests, and how cool would it be to serve them something French and luscious?”

Perele sighed. “What do you have in mind, darling?”

“It’s called tarte Tatin. It’s simple, really, just an apple tart in puff pastry with caramel. Hardly any ingredients — just apples, sugar, butter, and—”

Perele broke in. “Butter? Marjorie, I told you, we never, ever use butter when cooking meat meals.”

“Oops, you’re right. “ Marjorie thought for a moment. “Well, margarine will do. So that’s no problem. Please, pretty please.”

Like so many before her, Perele Schwartz fell before the onslaught of words. “Okay, Marjorie, tomorrow, when the meats and chickens are marinating, you can make your fancy dessert.”

Thrilled, Marjorie offered to race to the local grocer for all the ingredients.

Finally, she was going to express herself in the kitchen.

Finally, she was going to be surrounded by compliments and congratulations.

Finally, she was going to impress the adult world that looked upon her as a foolish young girl.

What could possibly go wrong?

To be continued…

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 849)