The Briar Club

Chapter 7 - 5

“This is agony,”

Bea said. “This is worse than watching a no-hitter.”

“This is worse than a stakeout,”

Harland muttered. “At least on a stakeout someone might shoot someone.”

This is worse than sweating through NKVD screening , Grace thought but didn’t say. The Briar Club stood clustered at the side of the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom, utterly transformed from its usual elegance: the walls were hung with red-white-and-blue bunting, an enormous banner blared “WELCOME TO THE SIXTH ANNUAL PILLSBURY BAKE-OFF!,”

and row after row of Stratoline ranges with accompanying refrigerators and countertop stations crowded the dance floor. One hundred bakers were baking away in a frenzy: the dinners and speeches and sightseeing were now behind them, and the Bake-Off had begun.

Halfway up the very last aisle of baking stations on the ballroom’s south side was Number Ninety-Two, this year’s youngest contestant: Lina Nilsson of Washington, D.C., whipping sugar, honey, and butter together like a dervish.

“I can’t watch,”

Nora moaned.

“She’s out of the gate strong,”

Claire said, ripping at a thumbnail. “She’s already on her second cake.”

The contestants had exactly six hours to make their recipe twice: one for the judges to taste, one to be photographed.

Dr. Dan, tallest of them all and even taller with Angela perched on his shoulders, strained to see into the oven as Lina took a peek inside. “Nice height in the pans. Angie, honey, can you see those cakes? Do they look brown?”

“Brown,”

Angela agreed, hanging on to two handfuls of her father’s hair.

“She’ll have a good crumb.”

Joe nodded, fingers tapping out a syncopated jazz beat on his thigh.

They were all experts in Lina’s eight-layer honey cloud cake by now. “You could do this in your sleep,”

Grace had said this morning, as the women all gathered in Lina’s room to help her get ready. Fliss had hooked her into a weightless confection of pale yellow organdy that made Lina look like she’d been frosted in buttercream; Claire tied her sash; Nora curled her hair; Pete sat to one side buffing her gleaming patent leather shoes. Lina herself sat in the middle looking so sick Reka sat poised at her side with a wastebasket in case she threw up what little breakfast she’d been able to choke down, and Bea paced back and forth saying things like “You just gotta control the game one inning at a time, Lina. Ingredient by ingredient, pitch by pitch—”

until Claire threatened to cram the curling iron down her throat.

“You could make this cake in your sleep,”

Grace kept saying, lump in her throat. Lina didn’t really look like her sister, but how could she not think of Kitty at a time like this? “You could make this cake in a coma!”

and Lina managed to look only mildly petrified as they escorted her down to the ballroom and she took her place with the other contestants. They’d all cheered their heads off when she strode in, four abreast with three other junior bakers, cameras flashing, band playing “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

But now there wasn’t anything they could do except watch in agony as Lina flew around her baking station like a buttercream fairy in a Pillsbury Bake-Off apron.

“She should have gone with an easier cake,”

Reka growled. “Those biscuit layers need to sit overnight if she wants the best texture—”

“Her first cake is already set and refrigerating.”

Claire’s fingers drummed on the strap of her pocketbook. “She’ll give the judges that one to taste—”

They all moaned as Lina dropped one of her layers and it cracked in half, but she calmly pieced it back together with sour cream frosting as the clock ticked agonizingly into the Bake-Off’s last hour.

“She hasn’t left herself much time to decorate,”

Fliss said tersely, her English voice clipped, a BBC broadcaster reporting on a wartime air raid. “That could cost her.”

“It’s not going to cost her.”

Pete was pacing back and forth like a horse in a box stall. “C’mon c’mon c’mon...”

The air was a jumble of smells by now as a hundred fragrant dishes hit countertops all across the ballroom: butter and sugar, chicken and chocolate, savory and sweet. Lina’s hands flew as she decorated the top of her cake with fresh strawberries. The bell rang out—“Time is up, bakers! Please step away so your entries may be collected—”

Lina pushed one last strawberry into a frosting swirl and collapsed against her Stratoliner, exhausted. They all stood watching like anxious new parents as Lina’s cakes were ushered away to the sequestered judges. They couldn’t swarm the ballroom; they had to wait for Lina to make her way to them. She looked like she’d just run a race: all the curl was falling out of her hair, flour dusted the lenses of her glasses, and that round little face so often set in sulky lines was absolutely radiant. “I did it,”

she called, pulling off her egg-daubed apron and waving it over her head. “Did you see me? I did it! ”

“You didn’t even place,”

Mrs.Nilsson sniffed when her daughter and entourage swanned back through the doors of Briarwood House in utter triumph. “All that work and you didn’t even place?”

“I still say she was robbed,”

Grace said indignantly. “Those Caramel Cream Sandwich Cookies that took second place did not look better than Lina’s cake—”

“And that Teen Bean Bake that took third!”

Nora huffed. “That girl’s mother was a prizewinner in the first Bake-Off, so you just know there was favoritism!”

Indignant looks from the Briar Club, who had lambasted the judges all the way home on the train. Lina had been as serene as a water lily floating on a pond, though, clutching her bag, which now held her official Bake-Off apron, a certificate stating that her recipe would be included in the annual Bake-Off cookbook, and a brand-new tooled leather address book bought for her by Grace, in which were the names and addresses of about fifty new friends. Your cake looks scrumptious , the fifteen-year-old junior division winner from Centralia, Kansas, had gushed, coming up to Lina after the results were announced. Much more difficult than my Rosy Apple Whirls! Want to write and trade recipes?

Lina was still glowing.

“Well, at least we get the Stratoliner and the Hamilton mixer out of it.”

Mrs.Nilsson sighed, looking a little wan from her bout of vomiting but clearly full of her usual vinegar. “What about that one-hundred-dollar check?”

“Turns out those were only for the top contestants,”

Grace lied smoothly. She’d already handed Lina’s certified check from Pillsbury to Pete and said, Deposit that in an account for your sister and say nothing to your mother! He’d grinned like a fiend and said, Already planning on it.

“I don’t know why you didn’t mention you were all going to New York,”

Arlene sniffed, swishing her skirts a little disconsolately. “I would have liked to go! Y’all even got in the paper!”

“Lina saved the clipping—”

Everyone crowded around to look, and Grace took advantage of the moment to reach into her own handbag, slip Mrs.Nilsson’s address book out, and stash it under some papers on the hall table. Pete and Lina’s father hadn’t shown up at the Bake-Off, and that disappointed Grace. When she decided to meddle and nudge, she wanted it to pay off. But there was nothing on earth even a defected spy could do to make a father care about his children.

“I’m going to frame that for your room, Lina-kins,”

Pete was saying. Photo coverage of the Bake-Off had mostly been of Mrs. Bernard A. Koteen, who had won the grand prize with her Open Sesame Pie, but one photographer had snapped a shot of Lina throwing her arms around Grace, both of them beaming, and run it with the caption: “Grace March of Washington, D.C., congratulates the Bake-Off’s youngest contestant: Lina Nilsson, 12.”

Grace smiled, watching Pete handle the clipping with such care. She’d never even seen the photographer, who must have gotten her name from someone else.

She honestly didn’t think a thing about it—that picture. She remembered that later in utter horror, how happy she’d been. And how careless.

“Thanksgiving dinner for nine,”

Grace said, making her list. Normally the Briar Club did an abbreviated celebration on the holiday—Mrs.Nilsson served a grudging late lunch of dried-out turkey breast and canned mashed potatoes and packaged rolls to Pete, Lina, and whoever among the boarders wasn’t visiting relatives, before going out for her usual Thursday evening bridge game. Grace had wondered, her first year at Briarwood House, what kind of bridge club met on Thanksgiving, and then she actually met the harridans: the meanest cluster of tightfisted crones imaginable, far more interested in making a few dollars at the card table than throwing a turkey in the oven for whatever family they hadn’t managed to alienate. Usually people like that just sat like a bump on a log making everyone else’s Thanksgiving unpleasant, Grace thought, so she made a point every year after of assuring Doilies that of course she shouldn’t stint herself of her usual Thursday game—and then as soon as she was gone, everyone trooped up to the top of the house for pumpkin pie and cider.

This year, though, Grace felt something more was called for. Hardly anyone in-house was going off to visit family for Thanksgiving of ’54, so she began planning: a full dinner for nine. What else was that new Stratoliner range in the kitchen for?

“It’s Lina’s oven, really,”

Grace had pointed out when Doilies complained about the idea of the kitchen being taken over by ten, even after being told she didn’t have to do any of the shopping or cooking. “And Lina says I can use it.”

That shut the woman up; she went off muttering and Grace started working out with a pencil just how big a turkey you needed to feed nine. She loved Thanksgiving. Anyone who had survived nine hundred days of starvation during a siege was going to swoon for a holiday that revolved solely around food. No need to wrap presents, no need to put up decorations, just pack in all the pie and Parker House rolls you could without exploding. “Let’s see, it’ll be me, Joe, Pete, Lina, Nora, Reka, Bea, Harland, Claire...”

“I wouldn’t mind coming,”

Arlene volunteered, looking petulant and a little bit sad at the same time.

“You aren’t going back to Texas for the holidays?”

Grace asked brightly. The Huppmobile was not a car anyone wanted parked at the Thanksgiving table.

“I haven’t really... ever since, you know. The town invasion at Lampasas, the war games? I told you about that.”

Grace remembered well: celebrating the end of the conflict in Korea with a bit too much gin, the ugly gleam in Arlene’s eye as she talked about American soldiers simulating a Soviet invasion in their own heartland. “I thought you found it so exciting,”

she couldn’t help adding with an edge to her voice. Trust me, you wouldn’t enjoy the real thing.

“Well, yes and no. I haven’t really felt comfortable going home since.”

Arlene started chewing her thumbnail, then caught herself, giving a quick hard shrug instead. “All the girls who managed to marry soldiers from that time just lord it over everyone . And you should see how much damage got left behind—soldiers chasing the turkeys on our ranch for fun, laughing when they piled up and began clawing at one another. Good American boys! I can hardly think what state actual Russkies would have left the place in.”

You don’t have to imagine it , Grace thought. Just look at Poland. “Well, I’m sure your hometown’s back to normal by now, Arlene. Won’t your parents miss you?”

A brief pause. “You don’t want me at Thanksgiving, do you?”

Arlene asked flatly. “Nobody does.”

“Mmm,”

Grace murmured. “Well, you haven’t made much of an effort to be liked around here, have you?”

“Claire’s a bitch and somehow everyone’s still friends with her. Reka’s old and mean, and people like her too.”

Arlene’s face was tight—had been since the Bake-Off, Grace thought. Apparently that hilarious group jaunt to New York had finally hammered home to the Huppmobile that no one in the house where she had lived for nearly five years even remotely liked her. “What’s wrong with me ? Why does no one like me ?”

“Well, you were very offensive about Mr. Cormier when I invited him to dinner,”

Grace pointed out somewhat acidly. “And you cost Reka her library job out of spite.”

“I never said anything to your friend’s face—”

“That hardly—”

“—and I didn’t know Reka would lose her job when I told the librarian! I apologized to Reka, years ago, and she hated that job. And she still isn’t very nice, and neither is Claire, and I don’t see why they still get to be—”

“Reka might be old and cross, but she still pitched in for Lina’s glasses and makes us all paprikas and haluski and drew sketches of Fliss to include in her letters to Dan in Tokyo. Claire may be a bitch, but she watched over me while I was”— drunk —“sick, and babysat Angela for Fliss, and helped Pete put up the greenhouse.”

Grace raised her eyebrows. “When have you ever pitched in for anyone around here, Arlene?”

“I made Red Crest Salad that one time,”

Arlene muttered. “And, well, I’m sure I put in a quarter for Lina’s glasses...”

You didn’t , Grace thought, but found herself adding Arlene’s name to the dinner list with a slight internal sigh. She just didn’t have it in her to leave anyone out in the cold on a holiday. “Maybe you can bring sweet potato pie...”

Thanksgiving dinner for ten.

And then: “Dan and I aren’t heading to Boston for the holiday after all,”

Fliss said, sounding relieved. “Apparently his parents are quarreling, and everyone’s finding an excuse not to come to their house while they burn the turkey and throw martini glasses at each other’s heads. Count us in!”

Dinner for thirteen!

And then came a telephone call a week before the holiday. “Mrs.March?”

a man’s gruff voice said. “John Nilsson here. I just got back from a business trip. I missed the message you left with my landlady about the kids.”

“You’ve missed a lot more about them than a message,”

Grace said coolly, looking down the corridor for Pete and Lina. One at work and the other at school, thank goodness. “They’re wonderful children. I’ve boarded in their house the past four years, and I like to think I know them very well.”

Better than you , her tone said.

“What business is it of yours?”

Bristling down the line, just a little.

“You should have showed up to the Bake-Off, Mr.Nilsson.”

Layering her voice with that gentle hint of reproach, that pause that just invited the guilty to rush and fill it.

He was silent awhile, on the other end of the line. Grace let the silence bloom, curling the telephone cord around her finger. “They are better off without me,”

he said at last, very quietly. “I’m... not a good influence.”

Normally Grace was inclined to take men at their word if they said they were bad fathers, but she thought she heard the echo of someone else’s words there. Mrs.Nilsson, maybe. And she couldn’t help but remember thirteen-year-old Pete’s face glowing as he recounted how, in the years before the war, his father taught him to make Swedish meatballs, took him out to play catch, tossed little Lina high in the air till she giggled. “Did you know your wife made your son drop out of school?”

The man’s voice shifted on a dime from uneasily apologetic to outraged. “Wait. What? ”

Grace made a decision on the spot. Maybe the man wasn’t a good influence, but exactly how much good was Doilies doing her children? “What are you doing for Thanksgiving, Mr.Nilsson?”

And she hung up a few minutes later thinking, Dinner for fourteen!

Thanksgiving morning. Grace was decorating the dining room table by nine, making the dreary room with its flocked wallpaper festive with branches of autumn leaves she’d collected at Prospect Park, wondering if she could persuade Mrs.Nilsson to let her shake the place up with some sunny new curtains and fresh flowers. It had taken her four years to gradually brighten the stairwell with its four-story Petrykivka -inspired wall vine, the corridor with new colorful vases and refurbished carpet, the kitchen with its window boxes full of marigolds, and the front room with its glistening suncatchers—maybe she could talk her way into bringing some light into the dining room too, make it a place people wanted to eat rather than something that should be kept under glass. Lina began banging around the kitchen by ten, whisking pie tins like a seasoned line cook at the Crispy Biscuit. “I’ll make anything but another honey cloud cake,”

she said airily when Grace finished up the dining room so it looked like an autumn glade and turned her attention to the turkey. “I’m trying a new piecrust recipe Helen gave me—”

“Who’s Helen?”

Grace eyed the turkey where it rested on the counter, wondering how she was going to truss the slimy thing without getting poultry blood on her red taffeta dress. Was turkey-trussing the sort of thing you could shove off on a man, because it involved an enormous hunk of meat? Or did American men only consent to help with meals if a grill was involved? Some customs about this country she would never understand.

“Helen Beckman from Iowa, the Bake-Off second-place winner in the junior division.”

Lina had been exchanging round-robin letters with a whole cluster of Bake-Off contestants for the past month, to Grace’s delight. “Helen says if you want to avoid a soggy bottom crust...”

Lina chattered, Grace trussed, Pete came in on a gust of icy autumn wind, blowing on his hands. “Mom’s off to her bridge party; she let me drive her with the weather looking so bad. It’s going to be an all-day tournament—”

Grace sent up a little Thanksgiving prayer of gratitude. The kitchen was really bustling now, Nora in a slim green dress and her reheeled Cuban pumps pulling down the good crystal punch bowl—“Are you sure we shouldn’t just carry plates up to eat on the floor in Grace’s room? It won’t be a Briar Club dinner without those green walls all around us!”

Grace got the turkey in the oven and turned her attention to the stewpot; Claire was stirring up punch and spiking it liberally with rum. “Grace, what’s that you’re stirring?”

“Sort of a beef-and-leftovers soup. Barley, potatoes, beef, some chopped pickles. Trust me, it’s tasty.”

Grace had decided to make Kirill’s mother’s rassolnik . The woman had produced a bastard of a son, but her thick, briny rassolnik was top-notch—excellent for curing hangovers, and there were bound to be some of those tomorrow...

Knock knock . Joe arriving with a bottle of bourbon, dropping a kiss on the back of Grace’s neck. “Thought you’d spend the holiday with your girlfriend,”

Grace said, laughing.

“Eh, we broke up. You look about as mouthwatering as a piece of cherry pie,”

he said, appreciating the red dress with its long tight sleeves and nipped-in waist, and Grace twirled so her full skirts flared. Stylish clothes; something else she’d never tire of. The thrill of having a closetful of dresses that had never been owned or worn by someone else first; it sated her soul nearly as much as her pyramid of canned food...

Knock knock. Harland coming in with two bottles of sherry, which promptly disappeared down everyone’s throats as Claire mashed potatoes and Pete made stuffed celery. “Someone dig Reka out of her room,”

Bea called, opening Joe’s bourbon. “She’s painting again and she’s lost track of what inning it is.”

Grace dashed up the stairs and hammered on Reka’s door awhile; the old woman answered looking sour as ever, with green paint under her nails. “Dinnertime already?”

she growled. “Just as well, I’m stuck.”

She waved at the latest canvas propped on her easel, and Grace made a May I look? gesture. “Feel free; it’s terrible.”

Grace surveyed the canvas: an abstract blur of the Briar Club on their sightseeing tour in New York. The day before the Bake-Off they’d gone to see the Statue of Liberty, even though Reka had groused about the tacky tourist predictability of it all. They’d all gaped up at the statue, serene copper-green Lady Liberty, and Grace had gotten a little choked up and also a little giggly. Give me your tired, your poor, your defected spies...

Reka’s painting showed them all in a line before the water, backs to the viewer as they looked at the bold green slash of the statue pointing at the sky. Grace and her friends drawn in abstract scribbles of paint, more implied than depicted—yet she knew every one of them at a glance. Claire’s bright hair, Bea’s arm winding up like a pitcher’s as she skipped a stone across the water, her own red skirt in the center... The painting was bright and unabashed, both abstract and specific, a portrait and a snapshot at the same time. “It’s good, Attila,”

Grace said quietly.

“It’s complete szar ,”

Reka retorted, but Grace could tell she was pleased. Handing the old woman her cane so she could hobble downstairs and beeline for the stuffed celery, Grace arrowed for Harland and drew him off. She was definitely not going to miss the chance for the newest member of the CIA’s International Organizations Division to take a look at Reka’s work for recommendation. “Weren’t you saying something about there being government funding for modern art, sort of as an anti-Soviet protest? Let me tell you what our Reka’s been working on...”

Knock knock . “Uh, John Nilsson,”

the thickset man on the doorstep said, eyes already hunting beyond Grace for his children. All going according to plan, Grace thought as she waved him inside. Thanksgiving dinner for fourteen, Briarwood House positively preening itself with holiday goodwill now that the last guest had arrived.

And then, three more knocks in a row.