The Sacher Torte

My grandmother would make the sacher torte every time my grandfather created an infidelity.

I must apologize for my English is not very strong.

Though I am not foreign, I am quite pretentious. After years of boarding schools and backpacking trips in Europe with schoolmates who were vaguely related to the royal family of Hungary, I have found that my consonants are harder and my trust is soft as Swiss.

The cheese, not the people. I always found them to be remarkably hard-hearted if you crashed through their living room window on a chilly night because you mouthed off to an ill-tempered llama.

But yes, the torte.

Grandmother would construct it over what felt like hours. There isn’t much to it, but when you’re drunk on bitters and cognac, you find that any baking project takes significantly longer than it otherwise should.

I would sit at the kitchen counter as a little girl, playing with my Wall Street action figures given to me by my father, and I would watch as Grandmother stumbled about the kitchen, muttering about the men she could have had, and delicately dropping whatever she grabbed into a baking pan, then swiftly covered it up with more chocolate.

“Don’t tell your grandfather,” she’d slur at me, “But I think I just dropped some aspirin in there. Perhaps he has a headache, no?”

For so long, I thought this was what cooking looked like.

Back home, I was never allowed in the kitchen. My mother had it in her head that if you saw someone performing domestic tasks, you’d be cursed to grow up and do them yourself.

That was why I was never allowed to come down from my room when the gardener or the pool man or the cook or the German shepherd nail trimmer was in the house.

When I was at Grandmother’s house, she took no heed of my mother’s fear, and she’d let me watch as she put together her sacher torte while she waited for my grandfather to return from the home of one of his seventeen mistresses.

“I hope he’s at Ruthie’s,” she would remark, tossing some tinfoil into the baking pan, which would later lead the whole thing to go up in flames, “I don’t mind her so much, because she has these lovely scented candles that are designed to smell like the homes of celebrities, and I do love when your grandfather arrives back reeking of Bruce Willis.”

One night, as Grandmother was screaming at Wheel of Fortune, and searching for the maid that she fired several years before, there was a knock at the door.

I was in the kitchen, because I hadn’t eaten since my parents had dropped me off the day before so they could go away for a few years, as was their custom anytime my father found a grey hair. The staff at my grandparents house had diminished greatly since my grandfather’s company had taken on a sizable new debt when it acquired Extra Diet Diet Fizzlitz, a carbonated beverage company that was already on its last legs when my grandfather decided he could revive it by offering intriguing new flavors like ‘Lemon’ and ‘A Little Less Lemon.’

Needless to say, it was not a great success.

That led to him spending more and more time with his mistresses, whose number had grown to a startling thirty-nine by that winter. It also resulted in my grandmother spending more and more time failing to find even the energy for resentment baking. Instead she would watch television and wander through their house like a ghost in an old cigar factory.

But when the knock came, I had a foreboding. My grandmother was not normally the one to do arduous jobs like answering doors or turning off the shower after she’d used it, yet for some reason, she managed to gain the strength to make her way to the front hall and open the marble door that was usually much too heavy for anyone but Crupper the Butler to open, because he used to be a strongman in the circus.

On the other side of the door, standing in the now falling snow, was not Ruthie, but another of my grandfather’s mistresses, and this one had no celebrity candles to endear her to my grandmother.

“Desk Lamp,” she shouted, hopefully using some sort of anecdotal nickname from the past, as the woman was assuredly a woman and not a desk lamp at all, “What are you doing here? Charles is out cavorting with another member of his extra-marital caravan.”

She began to shut the door as she said the last part, but Desk Lamp stuck her foot out, nearly crushing it against the marble, but it had the desired effect. My grandmother looked startled and also impressed that Desk Lamp’s foot was so steady.

“I’m not here for him,” the mistress said, with a dramatic flair on the word “here” so that it sounded like “here-ah.” I wondered if she might be Slovenian, like my tutor Skaska, who had perished the year before in a tragic Kentucky Derby party accident.

It turned out Desk Lamp had arrived to tell Grandmother that she was pregnant, and guess who it belonged to?

Years later, when my mother finally returned, she would explain the birds and the bees to me while walking through our combined apiary and aviary, just in case she needed to point out examples. By then, I was nearly forty, and had two children of my own, but I appreciated the talk all the same, as I had no idea that female bees often mated with male cockatiels, but then again, my mother was also quite helpless with nature and facts pertaining to it.

My grandmother moved Desk Lamp into her home that night, and when my grandfather came home the following evening, he found the three of us in the kitchen, Desk Lamp and I being instructed on how to make a sacher torte by my Grandmother, who seemed rejuvenated at the thought of having a child around the house, even if it was one belonging to another woman.

Grandfather went immediately to bed, the sight of Mistress #12 and his wife, baking right in front of his third favorite grandchild, was too much for him, and he passed away peacefully that very night. Of course, when I say “peacefully,” that is only a guess, because we did hear screaming for several hours throughout the evening, but we assumed it was Pat Sajak on the television, as frustrated as we were that nobody thought to buy a vowel.

I have never made a torte as good as my Grandmother’s, but then again, I am very happily married, and you know what they say--

Happy in love, no reason to bake.

And also, you can never find the cognac when you really need it.