At sit-down dinners, the champion Chilean dish was pastel de choclo. Pastel (confection) of choclo (corn) had a bottom layer of spiced beef, onions, and raisins. On top of that was a thick yellow layer of corn pudding, baked until the sugared top was crusty and divine. Plopped onto a delicate flowered plate, it looked unusual, but oh, such a flavor. Craig Claiborne even published Rosalia's own recipe in The New York Times.
For the really big sit-down dinners ("monster rallies," Felicia called them), extra folding tables were set up in the dining room. When they were all laid out with their linens, silver, flowers, and china, everything winking in the mirrors and candlelight, the effect was like a hallucinogenic Arabian Nights banquet. We'd come up the back stairs and peek at the proceedings from behind the paneled screen that depicted a scene from Un Ballo in Maschera, with rustically hand-painted masked figures dancing around and stabbing each other and falling down—a gift from our parents' friend Franco Zeffirelli, the opera director.
The party we remember best is, of course, the one that featured a disaster. Herman Shumlin, a theater producer of fidgety disposition, was already a kind of verbal family mascot. Our Uncle BB loved the name so much that he never missed an opportunity to shoehorn "Herman Shumlin" into a sentence. At this particular dinner party, Mr. Shumlin inadvertently kicked the wing nut under one of those elegantly disguised folding tables, causing it to sink calamitously and dump Mr. Shumlin's dinner right into his lap. That was pretty good, but the best part, the part that still brings tears of joy to our eyes, was that after Daddy loaned Mr. Shumlin a clean pair of trousers and the table had been hurriedly reset and everyone had settled edgily back into their dinner…Herman Shumlin did it again.
Whatever their differences, and there were many, Felicia and Lenny agreed on this much: Cooking was something other people did for you and that you did yourself only in emergencies. Mummy could actually produce a few dishes, most of them involving eggs. She could make a nice omelet and, for an elegant lunch, she would whip up a hard-boiled-egg thing baked with cheese and béchamel sauce. It was delicious, though afterward it made you feel as if you'd swallowed a hippo whole. And, like all Chilean ladies, Felicia could make a fresh mayonnaise. We often found her beating egg yolks, adding the oil drop by drop while watching Walter Cronkite deliver the CBS Evening News.
You couldn't exactly call Daddy's kitchen activity cooking. Many mornings, we'd discover the evidence of his insomniac excursions: spooned-out jars of Beech-Nut strained veal; an empty eggshell with a hole in one end, the contents having been sucked out raw; godforsaken messes of peanut butter and canned corn in a saucepan, the blackened dregs still bubbling noxiously on the stove.
His one culinary triumph involved a sauce for venison that he volunteered to prepare at a friend's ski lodge in Vail, Colorado. We heard him tell the story often. The principal ingredients of his magic sauce were Coca-Cola, Scotch whisky (something he'd certainly been sampling when he volunteered to cook in the first place), and his great discovery of the evening, arrowroot—the alchemic final ingredient that literally brought it all together. He clearly remembered, he told us, the guests swooning over the robust yet subtle flavors.
Around the same time that we moved across town to our upside-down apartment in the sky, we also acquired a country house in Connecticut, a mere hour and ten minutes away. It had a swimming pool and a tennis court, woods you could almost get lost in, old barns to explore, and neighbors' properties to sneak onto. In Connecticut, Daddy reverted somewhat to his old bachelor habits, wearing questionable shirts and bathing suits, and enjoying his primary gastronomic passion: food he could eat with his hands and get all over his face: lobster, T-bone steak, barbecued ribs, and corn, corn, corn. Every day in August included a trip to the Wakemans' farm, down Long Lots Road. Daddy often volunteered for this errand, taking us along with him in his convertible with the radio tuned to our favorite pop station. He enjoyed this errand because Farmer Wakeman gave him special permission to wander into the corn rows, strip a few ears, and eat them on the spot. "Heaven!" he would crow through a mouthful of yellow mush.
Felicia turned some old stables into a studio for Daddy. It was rustic but not too rustic, with a fireplace and central heating, an air conditioner, and an antique stand-up desk Daddy loved because it kept his back from hurting. One day he emerged from his studio waving a big sheaf of papers over his head. "I did it!" he cried, as he crossed the lawn. His Symphony No. 3, Kaddish, was finished at last. We all cheered, and Mummy jumped into the pool with all her clothes on.
A few months later, President Kennedy was assassinated. I was 11, Alexander was 8, and Nina was a toddler. Lenny dedicated his just-completed symphony to Kennedy's memory. The grown-ups still gathered, still smoked and drank-in fact more than ever—but it was different. They were distracted and tetchy. They watched television all day long: Imagine, after all the grief they'd given us over the years for doing just that. It was kind of fun to watch so much TV with our parents, even if it was just the news. So there we all were in the library, watching TV together, when Jack Ruby pumped Lee Harvey Oswald full of lead. Our parents were electrified. They read every assassination-conspiracy book the minute it appeared. Then they had to hide them all the following summer when Mrs. Kennedy herself came to our Connecticut house for the weekend with Caroline, John-John, and two station wagons full of Secret Service agents.
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