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It wasn’t heard often.Īt the bottom of the stairs was a low-ceilinged passageway that led to the basement’s outdoor entrance. That was one of the few stories he told in which he was ever at a disadvantage. The horse had run back to the farm, and the men had gone out looking for my father, not finding him until several hours later, lying in a ditch. Years before, while riding alone one Sunday morning, he’d been thrown from his horse and landed on an irrigation pipe, cracking his pelvis. He moved carefully on the stairs, gripping the right-hand railing and lowering his foot slowly onto the next step, then stamping down with his heel to make sure it gripped before putting his weight on it. He was dressed in his casual weekend clothes: wide-wale corduroys the color of straw, a pale-yellow dress shirt, beautiful brown ankle boots with pink socks poking out of the tops. Thrilled, I followed him down the steep, curving steps that led to the basement. “You can help me pick the wine for tonight,” he said one Saturday afternoon before a dinner party, when I was seven or eight. meant that he was joking, and, moreover, that he wanted me to see that he was joking. It was like whale talk.Īfter some time, I realized that the bland, trust-me look on his face when he explained about W.C. “ Cee Eee Oh” was among the first sounds I recall hearing at the dinner table. Seabrook, the owner of the company, had sold the business to a wholesale grocery outfit from New York. But by the time I was born, in the late fifties, the frozen-food empire was no longer his-C. He had seen the wine cellars in some of those places, and he had set about building one for his own demesne, in Deep South Jersey. Seabrook (called Jack), was the scion and president of Seabrook Farms, a large frozen-food company that operated on more than fifty thousand acres in southern New Jersey-a kind of feudal empire that resembled, in his mind, at least, the venerable inherited estates of Great Britain. There was no wine in the bar except for a few bottles of lesser whites in the fridge, for those sorry guests who preferred a glass of wine to a cocktail before dinner. Clearly, the wine and the champagne he served at dinner and at parties came from somewhere. Its location was a mystery to me, at first. Most of my father’s alcohol was secured in a cellar somewhere in the basement. “That’s better, thank you, darling,” my mother said, but I could tell she was worried about Mrs. So I redid the whole plan, trying to draw the bar to scale, but it still came out larger than it actually was.
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I dutifully erased the rectangle marked “BAR” and made it smaller, but now it was smudged, and more of a focal point than ever. My favorite, the Bullshot (it sounded like “bullshit”)-Worcestershire sauce, beef broth, and vodka-was for the morning after, if someone had a hangover. There were the names of cocktails: Martinis, Daiquiris, Manhattans, Old-Fashioneds. There were chrome-plated grippers and squeezers and shakers that my father washed and laid out on a dish towel before the guests arrived. The liquor cabinet was a men’s club of masculine archetypes: someone’s ornery grandfather on the whiskey bottle on the gin, a British Beefeater, dressed like the real ones we had seen at the Tower of London, in a bright-red jacket and round black hat, holding a long spear. It sounded big-the violent rattle of the Martini shaker and the muted explosion of a champagne cork reverberated throughout the house. The bar was like a magic hat from which a magician pulls impossibly long scarves of colored silk. Although small, the room produced maximum merriment per square foot. The bar was a narrow passageway off the dining room which connected the front of the house with the back. My bar, labelled “BAR” in big, blocky letters, was a large rectangle exactly in the middle of the plan, as big as the kitchen. “It’s just the size of the bar, darling.” She laughed again-light but with a hint of tension. I was proud of my work, and showed it to my mother. Eventually, I managed to fit all the rooms into the square boundaries of my plan. I was momentarily outside the familiar rooms and the lives we lived there, looking in. I liked the way the assignment made me think. I had to re-start a couple of times until I got a feel for the proportions. Our house was big, but I did my best to include all the rooms on the first floor-kitchen, dining room, breakfast room, library, drawing room (a funny name for the room where the adults sometimes played cards), living room, two powder rooms, and bar. John’s Day School, had given the class a homework assignment: draw a floor plan of your parents’ house or apartment.