Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(24)

8

The Pearl Anniversary

You would think that food—its ready command of our senses granting it immediate access to our hearts and minds, our appetites and memories—could be trusted to speak for itself.

Not so, apparently. In the 1950s, when I was freelancing, I was often enlisted as a grocery-aisle Cyrano, a ventriloquist for the new and improved, repeatedly making the case that the way Mother did it was not, in fact, best.

Sometimes clients would send me samples of the product for which I was composing copy. Sometimes they would also request that I build the ads around recipes, or at least let me know that the ads would have these recipes embedded within them. One unforgettably repellent-sounding one was as follows:

2 cups of roast beef, ground

3 tbsp Karo syrup





3 tbsp vinegar


Take the gravy from the roast and cook all together about 5 minutes.

A little salt may be necessary.

Suggest serving this with pickled peaches.

Fortunately, the food at Grimaldi—Northern Italian cuisine of a superior quality—is nothing like that. Unfortunately, I am still full of damnable Oreos when I arrive. Yet I find the garlic smells and the clinking knife-and-fork-on-plate sounds a welcome greeting. Even the Sinatra recording that’s playing—that tired Italian restaurant cliché that I’ve never liked—feels right tonight, just because it’s familiar.

Alberto, the owner, is at the front of the house, standing next to the hostess, going over the evening’s reservations. Shoulders slightly stooped but still natty in his charcoal-gray suit, he hails me as if I were family.

“Lillian, mia cara, right on time,” he says, embracing me. Then he says to the hostess, “The reservation is under Boxfish. I’ll take her to her table, don’t you worry.”

Alberto moved to Manhattan from Lombardy in the early 1950s—born in Milan, like my ex-husband Max’s parents. He still has the accent, tuneful and rhythmic. Max’s accent was pure New York: dropped final Rs and nasal diphthongs.

Alberto installs me in my red leather banquette, the same one I sit in every New Year’s Eve.

Most of what we consider beauty is manufactured, but the fact of that manufacture does not make it unbeautiful. Grimaldi as conceived by Alberto is like this: garish paintings that one early reviewer said looked as though they’d been purchased by the square foot and gleaming reproductions of classical bronze statues.

“What’ll it be tonight?” he says. “We got anything you like.”

I hate that I have to tell him that I don’t want anything.

“Alberto, I’m afraid I haven’t got much of an appetite tonight,” I say, without saying why.

The white tangle of his eyebrows rears back, and he’s about to start persuading, insisting, but then he intuits my mood and stands down. “Mind if I take a load off for a moment and join you?” he says. Younger than I am, he is still categorically old, and he lowers himself into the seat with caution. “It’s not because you are too sad, now, is it?”

“Not exactly,” I say.

“There is something about the year’s end that leads to a taking of stock that can lead in turn to melancholy. Isn’t that so?” he says, candlelight from the red votive holder on the table flickering over his wrinkled face. “There is at least for me.”

“It can tame one’s appetite,” I say.

“For me, a way to handle that sadness is by being a Catholic,” he says, and I laugh. “I know it sounds maybe crazy,” he says, “but here is what I mean: The turn of the year is the time of resolutions, yes? Makes me feel like a confession. Like the sacrament of reconciliation. The examination of conscience, the contrition, the admission, and—eventually, maybe, if you’re lucky—the feeling of absolution following the penance.”

A waiter comes by, and I order a glass of Chianti. After he’s gone, I say, “I’ll drink to that, Alberto. And that was rude of me—should we have ordered you one? To toast?”

“Nah, Lillian, I’m working,” he says, waving a hand to brush the suggestion away. “But you, you celebrate.”

I do not say that I feel uncelebratory. Rather, “It’s also a matter of personality, right? That feeling you’re describing. Important to, and practiced by, those who are already predisposed to lists and rituals.”

“Ah, Lillian, Lillian, exactly, exactly,” says Alberto. “You and me, we’ve always been simpatico.”

“Haven’t we?” I say. “You’ve always made the city feel even more like home—almost thirty years now. It’s the year after next that’s the big one for you, isn’t that right? What will you do to celebrate? Thirty years is the pearl anniversary, if memory serves. Oyster specials, maybe?”

“It won’t be me who decides,” says Alberto, eyes down at the white tablecloth, not meeting mine. “I didn’t want to tell you, Lillian, but I won’t be here for that. We’re selling the place. To my nephew, so it’s not going to close. But we’re leaving this summer. Me and Fabiola are moving to Palm Beach to be near Al.”

“But Al’s running the restaurant down there just fine by himself, isn’t he?” I say.

“Of course he is,” says Alberto, looking up at me with brown eyes that seem faded, like mud that’s turned back to dirt in the sun. “I taught that kid everything he knows. He’s expanding the Grimaldi empire. But he’s expanding it to places we actually want to spend our twilight.”