From Both Sides of the River
by Charlie Anne Cutter Mikkelsen
There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. --- Soren Kierkegaard
Prologue
Fact or Fiction
THE COOKING SEASON of 1980 in Provence was the ecstatic moment of her life. After years of raising children and suffering extraordinary grief, Mary Helen had, at last, transformed herself. She had just completed another term as American assistant to the revered cooking icon, Simone “Simca” Beck at her school of French cookery in the South of France. Mary Helen was euphoric, dreaming of many more seasons in the lavender drenched countryside.
“For as many years as Simca teaches,” she wrote in her reflections on Provence,“I hope she will allow me to serve as her assistant.”
Simca must have felt the same way, because she paid special tribute to Mary Helen in her latest book, “New Menus From Simca’s Cuisine”:
. . . to one person in particular—generous, devoted, efficient, tireless in the testing and retesting of recipes. . . My acquaintance with this gentle-spirited and exquisite woman has been one of the most fortunate of my life.
When her husband died, Mary Helen, formerly a devoted house wife, suddenly found herself alone raising eight children from five to nineteen-years old. In addition she was left with two businesses and an unwieldy “gentleman’s farm” to run. While she skillfully managed all of that, she longed for an achievement all her own, an undeniable passion—a new love. To her utter surprise her new love was cooking. Mary Helen had never, ever found cooking to be an enjoyable activity; it was a chore that had to be completed every day, three times a day multiplied by 10 or more people.
It took years after her husband’s death for Mary Helen to regain her balance. But when she did she virtually flew from hamburgers and coddled eggs to soufflés with fine herbes.
On a whim, she attended a benefit luncheon in Minneapolis featuring the local French cooking teacher Verna Meyer. Following an enchanting introduction to Meyer, Mary Helen began attending cooking classes, soon becoming Meyer’s assistant. Seventeen years later, Simone Beck invited Mary Helen to serve as her assistant in France.
In 1980, the year Mary Helen purchased an old hotel to restore as a restaurant, Simca wrote outlining the itinerary for her next trip to France. It was on that trip, after the completion of cooking classes that Mary Helen hosted a celebratory party of eight on an extravagant tour of three-star restaurants from Nice to Crissier, Switzerland. With Simca beside her, Mary Helen was giddy, as she demonstrated her newly learned French, inquiring about wine and the Chef’s specialty du jour. She fingered her signature strand of pearls and competently ordered aperitifs, silken foie gras, veal mousse, and scallops in crisp puff pastry.
The very idea! That a Minnesota woman, a granddaughter of Irish immigrants, could ascend to such heights in the world of French cooking was what Mary Helen referred to as, “a surprise package elephant and pig.” In that year, at that moment she was as deliriously happy and as content as she had been in her first year of marriage many years ago.
Mary Helen taught a cooking course at The New Food School in Moorhead, Minnesota. A writer for The Fargo-Moorhead Forum interviewed her for their Sunday food section. In the article titled, “A Cook by ‘accident,’” the reporter described Mary Helen’s outlook on life as, eternally optimistic and self-deprecating.”
Explaining what led to her new love—cooking, Mary Helen explained, “I consider myself accident prone. My whole life’s been like that. But I don’t quarrel with it. Everything’s turned out pretty well.”
The enormously understated first accident she refers to was her husband’s death.
As Mary Helen’s third child and second daughter, I easily found my place next to her in the kitchen and in the dining room at home and in our separate restaurants. You really get to know a cooking partner when there’s rough-to-fine chopping and deft, light folding going on in the same small work space. When the heat and tension are high in the kitchen. I don’t believe Mother owed her success to any accidents. She was exceptionally talented, hard working, focused and very clever.
When I became an adult and a parent myself, Mother confided in me. On the airplane going from Minnesota to The Great Chefs of France Cooking School in California, Mother told me how she imagined the future unfolding for each of her children. She was, as usual, prophetic.
After Mother’s death my siblings and I discovered fragments of her story and her secrets all kept in safe places where they could be found and explored later—much later. In her lifetime she managed to establish and nurture authentic friendships with each of her adult children. Every relationship was skillfully focused on the talents and dreams of the child.
Our particular friendship was nurtured by a shared passion for good food. So, everyone agreed I should receive the awkwardly huge cardboard box of Mother’s cooking memorabilia.
When I sat down with the box to sift through the random accumulation of culinary treasures, I didn’t expect to find anything new or shocking because I knew my mother very well.
In addition to newspaper stories that Mother saved about my own restaurants, I found notes from cooking schools she and I attended together. Our notes were almost identical. I read several letters from Simca, each beginning with, My very dearest Mary Helen. In one letter Simca excitedly details plans for her next visit to Mother’s home in Minnesota.
Deeper into the box, as I sorted through recipes from LaVarenne, the Paris cooking school Mother attended, I uncovered an autographed copy of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” co-authored by Simca and Julia Child. I read stacks of Mother’s recipes from Mary Helen’s Kitchen, each one carefully edited by Simca, herself. Wow! Simca as an editor. Mother must have been exhilarated.
My heart ached as I picked up several sheets of onion skin paper and read my own lost opportunity. Apparently Mother was writing a cookbook with me, but I was unaware of this collaboration. Was I just too busy to pay attention? There were so many times Mother came to visit me “at work.” She came to tell me her own news, but I was busy, too busy, cooking and serving and planning the next menu, the next important event. She saved some of my recipes and a letter she’d written to an agent pitching our proposal. How could I have ignored her generosity?
Beneath a bundle of class notes from “Thrice,” the St. Paul cooking school where Mother taught, was a menu from Roger Verges restaurant, Moulin de Mougins, near Simca’s home in Provence. Simca described Verges as one of the “gastronomic temples.” After a day of classes with Simca, Mother and I feasted on a five-course dinner at Verges, starting with truffles or as the French would say, “black diamonds,” followed by an incomparably smooth fish mousse, the most perfect head cheese and fresh raspberries in a puff pastry shell with crème fraiche drizzled with caramel.
Hours after I began my journey through Mother’s treasures, I was surrounded by two three-foot piles of recipes, menus and newspaper clippings. Still remembering Mother’s pride in her latest accomplishments, I spotted something else in the bottom of the cardboard box, something out of place, mysterious and instantly disturbing. All thoughts of heady truffles and fruit-filled pastries suddenly vanished.
Most people tell me I had an extraordinary childhood, but the truth is, to me it seemed pretty ordinary. Our life growing up along the Mississippi River at The Last House on Park Street was normal, even bucolic in the 1950’s. Certainly not fraught with discontent. As children, we walked through the pasture on cow paths all the way to King’s Island without ever leaving our property. We lived on the same land where our father grew up. He was a World War II Navy pilot and after the war he began work on Main Street as a small town lawyer, like his father. Aside from his occasional inexplicable bouts of sadness, my father was an ordinary guy. My parents hosted square dances, couples bridge club and dinner parties like a lot of their friends in those days.
Maybe it wasn’t average to have eight children or to raise baby lambs in the basement, or name our pet pigs after Dick Tracey and his girlfriend, Model. And, it might have been a little odd to have a big noisy sea plane anchored in the river all summer long. Taking off, landing and taking off again. It was a fact that every summer my father flew his plane, at least once, to Canada and even the Arctic to go fishing. To his children, his absence became a season of its own.
Honestly, for me the most difficult part of growing up was our names starting with our last name, Cutter. Rich fodder for the bullies. “Cutter, Cutter cut the butter,” was the favorite taunt. And, “What are ya gonna name your next kid? Cookie?” Our first names were crippling enough and anything but ordinary, especially in the ‘50’s. All the girls had boys’ names and the poor boys had . . . well, extraordinary names.
My oldest brother, Leeds Darrah, had a cow named Beulah, who lived in the alfalfa field across Park Street. She provided all our milk, butter, cream and ice cream. Of course, Mother needed help with children and the resulting laundry, ironing and cooking, so when our fifth baby was born, it seemed reasonable that we would have a house keeper.
As an adolescent, I discovered that not all teenagers had to have a pilot’s license before they could get a driver’s license. But the Cutter kids did. In addition, we were forced to live through my father’s obsession with planting thousands of trees every Arbor Day.
In general, though, my childhood at The Last House on Park Street seemed peaceful enough probably because my parents were usually in agreement, sharing common values, each with a quick wit. My father concocted amazing schemes and Mother supported, even seemed to relish his challenges. By way of completing his dream of being a gentleman farmer, he developed a routine of ordering animals to be delivered while he was fishing in Canada. One year he arranged for thirty white face cattle to arrive three days after his departure. We had no fences. Mother organized the hired man and all the children. We built the fences.
Early on I recognized my parents as co-conspirators; they amused themselves and took pride in the way they raised their “brood,” as my father referred to us. It’s true they were the Democrat and the Republican, the Catholic and the Methodist. But from my perspective, they set a high standard for marriage; they were the proverbial match made in heaven and they were really having fun. All of which made the story I found in the bottom of the box questionable and distressing.
Even before removing it from the box, I began devouring the story typed on three sheets of thin blue paper.
It was written by Mother shortly before she died. The setting was Simca’s garden at Domaine de Bramafam. Her young characters, Bridget and Peter, were my parents: Peter, a bookish lawyer and World War II Navy pilot, and Bridget, the writer of radio soap operas and daughter of a pacifist school teacher. That sounded familiar. Mother had recounted their romantic wartime courtship every time I asked. I couldn’t put the papers down.
It was her character’s shortcomings I did not recognize. Maybe I didn’t really know my parents after all. But I did! I worked for my father from the time I was twelve years old. Every day after school and every Saturday morning. I began as a gofer and worked my way up to typist. My father and I drove home for lunch together on Saturdays and home after work every day.
Seldom did he talk to me in the car. But I paid attention to the lines of worry on his forehead. He was quiet, thinking about work maybe or mentally preparing himself for all that awaited him at home: Mother pregnant with our eighth baby, my two-year old sister, Oscar, screaming her head off because she bumped into the corner of the coffee table again. The little kids were always fighting and climbing on top of the bookcase. From the driveway, you could hear my nine-year old brother, Andrew Shinski, yelling at everyone because someone knocked over his erector set, again. You couldn’t count all the mosquito bites, fat wood ticks and cases of poison ivy in the summer and the number of times the Christmas tree got knocked over every single year. Two times Dad had to come home from work because of a howling chimney fire when someone put too much wrapping paper in the fireplace all at once.
I think my father was puzzled, even saddened, by the big kids gradually growing out of his control, stretching outside his visions for them. The improprieties of it all. My older sister, Acey, aspired to be a carhop at Bimbos drive-in, and Leedsie suddenly preferred the public skating rink with a warming house that reeked of creosote and rocked with hockey-playing, leather-jacketed “thugs.”
Hard for my father to understand why his children would enjoy those things more than working for him or skating with him on the river next to a bonfire on Willow Island. His life must have felt increasingly more complicated as his brood matured.
But in Mother’s story Bridget claimed that Peter was controlling and “. . .capable of reducing her to compliance.”
Bridget’s charges were simply not true. What in my parents’ lives would have fueled such accusations? How could she even make it up? For 22 years his children believed he was dead. But, Bridget saw him in that garden in France, and what’s more: “. . .she was ready for him.” Or was that the scene Mother wanted to believe? More jarring than anything else, her main character “understood what had, in his mind, justified his leaving and she knew just how he had managed it.”
The story ended dramatically and inconclusively in mid-sentence, leaving me with questions about the reality of my childhood memories: fact or fiction.
Feeling like an accomplice, I gripped the blue papers firmly in my lap. Curiously, they were attached to a French menu and more painstaking recipes, typical of Mother’s later years. The recipes were also typed but on business-like stationary imprinted in the upper left-hand corner with a sepia photo of our home at The Last House on Park Street. Ahhh, I thought, there really are no accidents. Isn’t that right Mother?
My mother did not parent by accident either. The Christmas I was thirteen and feeling stupid and awkward, in other words, a typical adolescent. Sometimes I wanted to be left alone, invisible. Just let me hide behind the living room door and watch the other kids playing with Christmas presents, fighting over the last candy in the stockings. Mother knew just how to return me to the flow.
Still wearing her Sunday mass dress and veiled hat, she slid the standing rib roast into the oven and called me to the kitchen.
“Charlie, dear? How would you like to come set the dining room table for dinner? You do such a nice job and you could use Grandma’s silver.” I groaned behind the door. She raised her voice above all the racket in the living room.
“And,” she added temptingly, “You could use those china plates you get such a kick out of.” Then, as if she’d just thought of it, she grabbed my arm and led me to the dining room. “How ‘bout using the porcelain dancing children for the centerpiece? That is, if you like.”
Wow! The porcelain dancing children and Grandma Cutter’s china.
In our house, setting the table was a privilege reserved for Mother. She sang as she created the scene, especially on the “big” days—birthdays, New Year’s Day, Easter, Christmas and, of course, Arbor Day. The china plates were ancient and delicate with a low-fired yellow crackle glaze. Painted around the edge of each plate was the scene of an enthroned, fat, half-naked Chinese Emperor being carried by servants in a parade led by elephants, draped in red blankets with golden tassels. I did get more than a kick out of those plates. During dinner, I’d move my mashed potatoes over and poke that half-naked Emperor in his belly with my fork, and whisper to Acey, “Gitchy, gitshy, goo!” Acey would laugh so hard she’d blow milk out her nose. I loved those plates.
Mother reached deep into the back of the dining room buffet and produced two wooden boxes. Sitting on the floor beside me, she carefully unfolded the purple velvet wrapping and placed the porcelain children figurines in my hands—a happy dancing boy, playing the tambourine and dressed in a floppy summer hat and light blue shorts. The barefoot girl wore a long flowing yellow dress and a flower garland in her hair with ribbons draped in curls over her shoulders.
Those dancing children were as fragile and rare as Grandma Cutter’s dishes and most people might well have considered the risk of chipped or shattered china. But Mother was never afraid of things getting broken, it was broken spirits she worried about most.
Even knowing that Mother’s story of Bridget and Peter was just the beginning, I filed it safely away along with my own doubts and fears. The rest, I decided, would surface when I was ready.
Chapter 1
Mouse as Spirit
Two years later Mother’s story returned on its own. I climbed the ladder against the wall in the deserted barn at The Last House on Park Street to sit in the open doorway of the hayloft one last time. I inhaled the balmy June air, the scent of the pine forest that we, the Cutter children, planted between the river and Park Street, how many Arbor Days ago? We had such glorious freedom those summers. From my perch in the barn, I could smell the river bottom and almost feel the silt between my toes. Those summer days when we waded out to the sandbar under the bowing elm branches where my father anchored his beloved Seabee.
The ground below me was the interstitial land between the garage and the barn. The kids owned that piece of real estate every summer, for our father’s price of a few clear agates. On that weedy overgrown plot we built our Shanty Town when the geese flew north in the spring. As per agreement with our father, we dismantled our town as we watched the geese flying south for the winter. Shanty Town and our responsibilities as community members shaped our lives in ways we could never have imagined back then, but our parents knew exactly what they were doing.
I tried to shake off the impending loss, knowing it would all be gone tomorrow. The property would be torched to make room for a housing development. What an intense fire it will take to burn down the home where my father grew up, where my mother cooked and knitted and every year baked hundreds of Valentine cookies for our classmates.
Imagine the heat, the incense and vibrant colors that fire will produce, the aroma
of four generations of love and care in the walls of our home, of the barn where I sat. At that moment a fat grey mouse skittered across the floor and plunked head-first into the oat bin at the dark end of the hayloft. Following his path, I noticed an old wooden trunk that must have been forgotten in the moving. I lifted the heavy lid and discovered parts of the Cutter kids’ Halloween costumes from more than forty years ago, all sprinkled with rat and mouse droppings. A pair of Grandma Cutter’s high-top button shoes, camouflaged in splotches of fragrant mold, rested on top of a mouse-chewed antique black-beaded velvet evening jacket and a black silk parasol—a complete witch’s costume.
At the bottom of the trunk I spotted a black notebook. Dusting off oat husks and bits of straw, I decided it couldn’t be anything important or somebody would have claimed it by now—one day before the fire. I sat down in the doorway and opened the warped and wrinkled cover.
What luck! It was my father’s World War II journal stuffed with a dozen postcards and letters some with mouse-nibbled onion skin envelopes dating from 1938 to 1940 complete with 6-cent stamps in the corners. Three of the letters were addressed to my father at The Last House on Park Street and sent from Eugene Bird, Secretary of the Coronado Dance Band. I knew the two men had created a band in high school to earn money for college. The letters included requests from resort owners along Lake Nisswa and the North Shore.
Eugene was a professional saxophone player and had been my father’s best friend for years. By now, if he was alive, he’d be in his seventies. Maybe he could shed some light on my father’s early life, his hopes and dreams, his disappointments. Maybe Eugene would know something about his sadness. Wouldn’t he, if I asked the right questions?
I held the journal close. It might be insignificant, but it was more than I had yesterday, more of my father than I’d had for over twenty years. At the very least he had held this book in his hands. He’d carried it with him and in some way it was a part of his story. However battered and torn, my father’s journal electrified my interest in Mother’s mysterious story.
With the journal on the seat beside me, I drove slowly down the driveway to Park Street, saying goodbye to all the blessed trees along the way; I had assumed they would stand forever—the oldest elm with the girls’ swing, its ragged rope still hanging from a high branch. And my favorite, a fifty-year old cedar tree planted by my father when he was nine; it was the first base on our front yard softball field.
At the end of the driveway was a small grove of pine trees where Mother hid Easter eggs in the lower branches, to be fair to the little kids. What was always obvious was my mother’s sense of social justice, compassion, and perseverance. Those virtues she magnanimously bestowed, like DNA, on all her children.
I will explore and unravel the mystery in my mother’s story. And, if Eugene Bird is still alive, if I can find him, maybe he will help me.
My search began the day after Christmas. On New Year’s Day, I trampled over a snow bank in a tidy neighborhood in St. Louis Park. My heart banged as I focused on the little bungalow. The kitchen door opened slowly. Then, steam escaped and through the fog I saw him, the Secretary of the Coronado Dance Band standing in the doorway with his arms wide open.
“Welcome Charlie!”
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I think any adult child of mourned parents can relate. Took me a while to realize there was an adult child narrating just FYI. Was painting the picture of the mother as a widow, first, the intent?
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Lynda Williams
Part 5: Far Arena (2009)
Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy