Tender at the Bone Read Online Free Page B

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 and 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 CivilWar, 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,” said 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 six-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 six her size two shoes actually fit me. Afterward I might walk around the apartment examining the etchings, watercolors, and drawings on the walls. They were all so