The dining room on Springhill Place in Los Angeles had its own French doors—exotic, Kiki thought—and inside was a long table and twelve low-backed mahogany chairs with upholstered seats. The bay window let in light that, at evening angle, filtered through a Chinese elm. Two small areas within the larger window enclosed arrangements of stained-glass apples, bananas, and pears. Inside the room stood the hutch and buffet, also mahogany, out of which the post-war Noritake and the lace or linen tablecloths would materialize for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. The dining-room walls in Los Angeles were papered more neutrally than those in the kitchen area, with its wild red hibiscuses. One picture hook held the Galahad print come to this place from her great-grandparents—framed, she could see on the back, in Provo, Utah, in 1908. Another supported the deep-stained knickknack shelf, with various small porcelains and decorative trivets.
The room was as rich and wooden dark a space as Kiki’s family had in that comfortable stucco house. On the highest of holidays, when 20-30 family members gathered there for whole days of eating, drinking, and finally walking it all off, children ate in the lower-level rumpus room. Her cousins and she sat before wobbling TV trays, and they might have watched a coal fire burning in the hearth, the painting of the cowboy sleeping on a cloud hanging from the flagstone above it. A Joey Bishop routine played on the hi-fi, or High and the Mighty on Channel 9’s “Million Dollar Movie.” Now and then, a parent would come down to check on them.
If the group was only half as large, everyone fit into the dining room of cloth napkins and candles burning. Kiki’s great-grandmother’s flatware lay out, freed from its dark, felt-lined case. If the occasion called for eating in that room at all, the menu included turkey, roast beef, or ham. Also mashed potatoes, whipped by hand by Kiki’s Uncle Bob. If beef was on the menu, also Yorkshire pudding, baked at the last minute in pans almost too large for the oven. Also giblet gravy, au jus, or something thicker, browner—thanks, in the last case, to Kitchen Bouquet. Also broccoli or green peas, the latter sometimes with small white onions or creamed. Carrots might arrive if they hadn’t been forgotten during boiling and thus burned to the pan bottom: This was the only failure her grandmother was ever teased for. Also store-bought brown-and-serve rolls. Also special complements to the main course: cranberry sauce and pork stuffing in one case, yams in another. One of them said grace according to the daily formula. They seasoned their food with crystal shakers tipped with Old World silver. The children were well-mannered and did not reach. They did not kick under the table. If they were good, they got to blow out the candles.
Aside from the need to watch their manners more closely on such formal occasions, those who lived in that house—Kiki’s grandparents, her mother, three brothers, and she—had an additional responsibility. Whenever they had a house full of guests, and especially at those times when they all faced each other in the same fancy room and, along with the rest of the group, surrounded fast-dwindling mounds of special food, it was their duty never to take the last helping of anything. As potatoes or meat disappeared, one of the three adults, Kiki’s grandmother in particular, would say F-H-B as a sort of muted aside to someone else’s conversation. It was as inconspicuous as a small clearing of the throat across the room, but to those noticing the food supply themselves, her grandmother’s eyes averted their way, it was enough. If their guests were aunts, uncles, and cousins—extended family members who knew the code themselves—her grandmother sent out a silent message for them to lip-read when no one else was looking: Family Hold Back. They’d pass it along, if need be, down that long table toward a near-empty bowl.
Over the course of many years, this special burden of theirs became, for the children, part of a secret game. How could they wedge the message into the mealtime palaver without becoming obvious? How to remain responsive to the guests while passing on their important reminders? They never learned Morse code, although that would have helped. Instead, they used an elaborate language of blinked eyes, faintly moving lips, discreet hand gestures, and, later on, the letters F-H-B indicated in Latin, French, or Spanish. It was, of course, the beginning of their being civilized.
It was also a perfect emblem for a family more reticent than most. They didn’t, like other groups of kin, keep a hundred dirty secrets, but they weren’t particularly free in discussing ones they did have, like Irene’s failed second marriage and Kiki’s great-grandfather’s fondness for the stray caress. During the time her brothers and she were growing up, talking did not equal healing. As Catholics, they made regular confession of their sins, but they did so in the confessional to a priest who was sworn to confidence. Healing was more personal than interpersonal, between them and God, the priest a shadow intermediary. If the reticence all older members of her family brought with them from England and Scotland and Germany made the children patient, less quick to judge others, polite at table and elsewhere, it also kept from them for many years those stories of personal error or abuse within the family at large. It kept Kiki from wondering more, or saying anything, about the belt-strapping one of her cousins got, behind the closed door of her own room, at one of those great holiday gatherings.
Despite those last things, though, she lay claim to a happy childhood. It was not uncomplicated, not idyllic. But it was nurturing, full of safe routine the children craved and those happy surprises—like hot fudge sundaes at C.C. Brown’s on Hollywood Boulevard—that took them out into the world beyond themselves. At table or elsewhere, her grandmother’s eyes never glared. Her grandfather’s anger aimed mostly at his own failings. To express frustration, he’d say, Good night, shirt, or For the love of Jehoshaphat, and remind them that cursing required no imagination. Her mother took her bitterness out on them when she couldn’t help it, but even then, working close to 15 years on the pain of her divorce, she did it in full view of Kiki’s grandparents. She would spank her children, but always through the clothes and not too hard. She would forbid them to do something but allow a grandparent to overrule her. Kiki’s aunts and uncles confused this way of managing her loneliness as immaturity, the way a daughter who never left her parents was bound to act. Instead it proved that even in her suffering she could hold back, just as she had been taught.
And after each of those great feasts in the dark room, family members spilled through oak doors to places their age and sex took them. To the kitchen to clean. To the quieter places where talk would happen. To the bedrooms of toys and dolls. To the yards, back or front, where a ball thrown over the ivy-covered fence or racing down the steep incline of Springhill Place, could easily take them to other, busier streets, to whole other sets of people like them, trying to hold together.
