A Late-Arriving Dinner Guest

 

I have the word "ceremony" in my mind, and it feels like a concept that's hard to sell modern people on. The importance of ceremony — of marking occasions and moments. Ceremony depends upon suspension — the lost art of arresting time and making one moment different from those around it.

My mother was great with ceremony, and trained me and my sister never to yield to the crushing casualness that began to envelop the world, just as we came into it. When she came to visit us in New York, from Sweden, I'd have my son dressed in a gold lame suit and cape at the airport, a handful of laminated balloons, and a feast of towering fruits, cheeses, and chilled champagne waiting for her. We spent hours setting the breakfast table, and took pictures of it before we sat down. I have photographs of dozens of overladen breakfast tables in Sweden and New York, over decades — always with candles. We made a point of overdoing everything, whenever possible. In my father's written depictions of their marital discord, to lawyers representing him in the 70s, it came up as a point of contention that dinner guests would be passed out on the sofa at 11 pm while my mother perfected the curves of a Viking ship carved from a melon. To make guests feel insufficiently welcome was a cardinal sin.

On what was, unbeknownst to us all, the last night she was alive, something made me dash out and spend my last $150 on Beluga caviar, champagne, and roses. Arriving, departing — anything was cause for these little feasts, and that one proved to be the very last one we ever had. Good thing I didn't suddenly become frugal or sensible.  

I know little about my parent's marriage — it exploded when I was three — but I cling to a few facts that serve as talismans of their lost world, and mine. They cooked their eggs, for example, to a recording of "Rule, Britannia!" played on the sunken record player in the living room, loud enough to reach the kitchen. This made for perfectly soft-boiled eggs. They ate steak dinners by candlelight at midnight. They had a Capuchin monkey named Max who sat on my father's shoulder when he typed on the terrace of their first apartment on West End Avenue. That's about all I know. Each time I think of these things, I salute them quietly. Good for them.

My favorite story was one of pure imagination. It was 1962. They lived in a one bedroom apartment on West End Avenue in New York. My father came home from work and found the apartment gleaming and decorated — more beautiful than it had ever looked, fit for a royal visit. Flowers everywhere, candles, dimmed lights, all the best crystal and china artfully displayed, and music playing softly. Champagne on ice.

"What's going on?" my father asked.

"Somebody's coming," my mother said excitedly.

"Who?"

She was dressed in a floor-length gown, her hair in a bouffant beehive.  She walked around lighting more candles, in no hurry to calm his curiosity. 

"Ulla, who's coming?" he asked again.

"Guess," she said, with slight smile.

"Is it a family member?"

"Yes."

My father started naming names of relatives, starting with her mother.

"Ingrid?"

"No."

"Soph and Ray?" (His parents.)

"No."

"Jerry? Mark? Cousin Jo?"

"No."

"Inga-Lill? Moster? Anders?"

"No."

"Henry? Selma? Mid?"

"No."

This guessing game went on for some time. My father recited the names of every relative on both sides of their families until he got down to third cousins once removed or distant aunts my mother grew up with in Sweden. Again and again, my mother shook her head.

He threw his hands up.

"I give up!" he said. "Tell me who's coming?"

She took him by the arm and said, "Let's go outside and have a drink."

"But Ulla, what about the guests? Don't we have to get ready?"

My mother turned around and looked at him with a look he says he will never forget and said:

"I didn't say when the family member was coming."

His jaw dropped when he finally got it.

The family member was going to be arriving much later. It was my older sister Bibi -- their first child.
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"Can you beat that?" my father said, smiling at the memory. "I even remember what color her gown was."

My father never knows what color anything is, including the walls of his kitchen. (We've quizzed him.) It's part of his staunch refusal to concern himself with material things or surroundings.

"It was red," he said confidently. "I remember exactly what shade."

Then we were silent.

"Celia, can you believe I remember that?"

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