“No you don’t!” Mrs. C raps her cane—cherry wood with a carved lion’s head at the top and, Ben’s always thought, an oddly masculine choice for her general aesthetic—hard against the ground. “You’re, what—twenty-three? Twenty-four?”
“I’m twenty-eight, actually,” Ben says, dry.
“Oh, psh, same thing,” Mrs. C says, waving a hand. Ben notices she’s wearing rather a lot more glittering jewelry than usual, as well as her best mink coat and its matching hat. “You’re tooyoungto go giving up on life; it’s unseemly. Wasteful. Look at you, with all your healthy organs and working joints! Sitting out here freezing to death like you don’t evenappreciatestill being able to bend both your knees. I won’t have it, you know. You’re coming with me.”
“I’ll come up in a minute, Mrs. C, I promise,” Ben says, not meaning it.
“Notupstairs, Ben,” says Mrs. C, as though the suggestion that she might want to return to the apartment she has refused to leave for nearly two decades is asinine. “I am out. Therefore: We are goingout.”
Then, to Ben’s absolute amazement, she steps up to the curb, lifts two fingers in the air, and hollers, “TAX-AAAAAAAAAAY,” with the lung strength and commitment of a much younger New Yorker, if one was dropped here via time machine from a different era. It works immediately, a yellow cab pulling up next to them before Ben can so much as pull out his phone to suggest a ridesharing app, and she turns to him, arching a brow.
“Well?” she demands. “Are you going to help me in or not?”
Ben, seeing no way around it, does so. When she is safely tucked inside the cab, she makes and holds direct eye contact with him, pointing at the seat next to her with a firm, unyielding, gnarled finger. Helplessly, he shuts her door, walks around to the other side, and climbs in, rolling his eyes when she pats him on the leg like he’s a little dog.
Before he can say it, the cabbie asks the question on his mind: “Where are we headed tonight?”
“Lillian’s,” Mrs. C says, grinning. “And step on it.”
“Lillian’s?” Ben demands, as the cabbie nods and lurches back into the flow of traffic. “Like, the steakhouse? Mrs. C, listen, it’s not that I fault your taste, but—it’sLillian’s! It’s one of the most famous restaurants in the city! It’s Saturday night! And theholidays! There’s nowaythere’s going to be a table free; they’llneverseat us?—”
“He’s right, you know,” the cabbie says, in congenial tones. “Not for nothing, but if you don’t have a reservation, you’ve got a better shot of eating on the moon than at that place tonight.”
“I think,” Mrs. C says, patting Ben’s leg again, “you should stop trying to tell an old woman her business, hmm? Andyou”—she fixes the cabbie with a fierce glare—“have been hired todrive,not to opine. We would like to listen to some light music, and keep the conversation to a minimum. I haven’t had the chance to observe this city in some time, and I would like to do it in peace,ifyou don’t mind.”
The cabbie, a man in his mid-fifties, makes amused eye contact with Ben in the rearview mirror. It could not be clearer that he thinks Mrs. C is Ben’s grandmother, and not seeing the point in breaking the illusion, Ben makes wincing, apologetic, grandsonly eye contact in reply. She might as well be his grandmother, honestly; she’s more involved in his life than either of his own ever were. Daniel’s mother had died in a car accident a few months before Ben was born, and while Lucia’s mother, Alessia, was alive until Ben’s late teens, she never left Italy once from birth to death. Consequently, Ben met her three times, and all three of those times she had looked him up and down and said what seemed to Ben to be a paragraph in Italian, which his mother had always then summed up as, “She says she’s glad to see you,” before hastily changing the subject.
He’s probably due, is the point, to be lightly humiliated at one of New York City’s oldest and most revered restaurants by forcibly following the whims of a stubborn old lady. It’s something to do, anyway; it’s keeping him occupied.
But to his amazement, when they arrive at the steakhouse, Mrs. C stalks right up to the host stand and demands a table for two. And when, unsurprisingly, the host sneers down at her and suggests she try making a reservation next time, she smiles at him like he’s given her a birthday gift, one she’s been secretly hoping for.
“Young man,” she says, leaning close and letting a note of crackling, grandmotherly kindness slip into her voice, “I think, if you were smart, you might pause for a moment here. You might say to yourself, this little old lady seems awfully confident, doesn’t she? And then you might consider calling up the owner—or getting tonight’s manager, perhaps, if you don’t know how to reach the owner yourself—and letting him know that DiDi Collins is here? Just a suggestion, dear. We’ll be happy to wait.”
Ben stares at her. The host also stares at her. Then, slowly, he holds up one finger, places a little card on the desk that says,We Will Be Back to Assist You Shortly, in ornate script, and steps away, muttering darkly to himself.
Three minutes later, he returns, muttering now firmly silenced, flanking someone who Ben would guess is the floor manager, based on her clothing, headset, and general vibe. Walking with her is another woman who looks to be waitstaff. He braces himself to be told that the reason multiple people have come to speak to them is so they can be escorted out promptly if necessary, in order to avoid disturbing the other guests.
His mouth drops open slightly when, instead, the floor manager zeroes in on Mrs. C like a homing pigeon and bursts into a huge, fake smile. “Mrs.Collins, it is an honor. I’m Jackie, and I could hardlybelieveit when?—”
“Let’s not make a fuss, dear,” Mrs. C says, smirking at Ben. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate it, you see, it’s that if anyone finds out I’m here tonight, I’m going to have to talk to them, and I can’t be bothered. You can keep a secret, can’t you, Jackie? And find us a nice table, out of the way?”
“Oh,yes, Mrs. Collins,” Jackie says, and, to Ben’s absolute astonishment, begins leading them back through the restaurant. “It’s all ready for you now, if you’d like to walk this way?”
As they follow Jackie back, Ben should be looking at the art crammed onto every inch of the dark wood-paneled walls, or craning his neck to take in the who’s who of New York ringing the various tables. But he can’t stop staring at Mrs. C in absolute astonishment, to the point that she rolls her eyes at him and says, in a pointed tone, “Jackie, can you tell me, is there any tongue on the menu tonight?” When Jackie apologizes that there is not, Mrs. C leans over and whispers in Ben’s ear, “There you go: no tongue served tonight. So maybe you’d better roll yours back up into your head and close your mouth, hmm? You’d think you were raised in a barn!”
Ben, realizing at this point that he has been looking at her semi-agape this whole time, snaps his mouth firmly shut. Then he waits patiently as they are seated, poured water, and given menus, and as he orders himself a gin and tonic and a strip streak, and Mrs. C, with absolute relish, orders herself a Cosmopolitan and the prime rib. When their waiter departs and they’re truly alone, he turns to her, eyebrows up, meaning to ask a dozen questions.
He only gets as far as, “Mrs. C,what—” before she interrupts him.
“It was my Harry, you know,” she says, her eyes going distant. “That’s why I can do that, even now. That was Harry: People remembered him. He was a financier”—she gives Ben a bit of a hairy eyeball at this, as though daring him to make acomment—“but most of what he did was finance restaurants. He had a real eye for which places would hit and which would bust. Lillian’s wouldn’t be here without him, and plenty of others wouldn’t be either.”
“Isthatwhy,” Ben says, his eyes widening, “you’ve met so many famous chefs? Julia Child, and—and JamesBeard,and?—”
“Oh, James was a dear friend,” Mrs. C says, putting one hand on her chest at the memory even while waving the other dismissively at Ben. “Myfriend first, in fact,I’mthe one who introduced him to Harry, not that I ever got any credit for it. But the rest, yes, generally. Harry and I met late, you know, married late—he was in his early sixties, and I’d just turned forty-five—but for twenty years we had aball.” She sighs and then occupies both hands with cutting and buttering a roll as she adds, “And then, you know, for three years we had more of a nightmare than a ball, and then I lost him. But that’s how it goes, at the end. Wouldn’t trade it, and until then, oh, it was parties and dancing and theater and music and the most delightful, delicious food—I wish I could take you back in time and show you around. Harry had this way of making everyone around him have fun, like his good mood was contagious. Everywhere he stood, the light shone a little brighter.”
This is the most Mrs. C has ever told Ben about her lost love; he should be touched, honored that she trusted him. Instead, he’s suddenly neck-deep in the mire of thinking of Pete—of the way he, Ben, would have described Pete much like this only aweekago—of how Pete had always seemed to make more space unfold for everyone in any room he entered?—
“All right,” Mrs. C says, rapping her knuckles sharply against the table. “That’s enough of my nattering, and enough lollygagging from you! Tell me your troubles. I insist.”
