by Chris Wallace, Paris Review
I used to joke that I have daddy issues with Jacques Pépin, because it was he who really raised me. My parents divorced when I was a year old and, until I was thirteen, they split custody in every conceivable way. It was my father’s habit to write in the mornings and watch his favorite cooking shows in the afternoon, with a drink, while preparing dinner. On the days I was with him, I watched too. Usually it was Julia Child, or the Frugal Gourmet; later it was Jacques, and then
Jacques and Julia. Recipes and technique were like my nursery rhymes and I grew up—“spoiled rotten,” my dad would say—only ever eating perfect pie crust. By the time I was eleven, my knife skills were impeccable, my Caesar salad the best ever (in my family, hyperbole is hereditary). When my mother invited my high school girlfriend and her parents for dinner I served a traditional osso buco and risotto Milanese. It was a success—my culinary coming out party—and one in which my father, who felt he deserved the credit, took particular pride.
As a Depression baby, my father was raised by a generation of people who wouldn’t utter a sound if their hair were on fire. He spent most of his childhood in the kitchen, with the family cook, because he was afraid to go anywhere else in the house. The Wallaces do their suffering in silence. My father’s father, David Frederick Wallace Sr.—Fred, he was called—went off on drinking benders, leaving the family for days at a time. He died of liver failure at just fifty-seven. Fred’s father committed suicide and the family never spoke of it. The thought of my own father having a personal conversation with his mother, or with his grandmother, whom everyone called the Dragonlady, seems impossible—with his Aunt Bess or his uncle, President Harry Truman, outrageous.
In my youth, my father and I continued this tradition, juxtaposing all that quiet with some good old yelling. My father is not small—6' 2'', and a barrel of a guy—and when I was a child he seemed to me a giant out of fairy tales: domineering, mercurial, and remote. I can still remember the terror I felt one night as I searched desperately, in vain, for the car keys as he screamed at me to find them. I, in turn, would try to injure him by attacking his cooking. He’s still heartbroken today from the time when, at ten, I said, “Your food smells better, but mommy’s tastes better.” Even into my adolescence we had little in common. When I got a scholarship to play football in college, my father, the opera fan, wrote in the local paper, “I thought I was going to have a choir boy, but I got a quarterback.”
It wasn’t until twenty-two, in a subterranean Italian restaurant in Cheyenne, Wyoming, on a road trip from Austin to Ogden, that I truly determined to get to know my father.
It was the revelation that did it—my mother breaking the secret that my father was gay. Over what I think was chicken in Elmer’s glue, she just let it slip. They’d been divorced for twenty-one seemingly celibate years. “He hasn’t told you?” she asked. “He told me he’d told you.”
I affected indignation, shock even. But the moment had the resonance of literature—naming something I didn’t know I knew. Later I would go around telling people that it wasn’t a conclusion a son could come to about his father, no matter the evidence. But the evidence, in retrospect, looked substantial: an encyclopedic knowledge of opera—gay; fabulous taste in furniture—also gay; phenomenal talent in the kitchen and a love for luxury and glamour—gay! How could I
not know? Though he was less flamboyant in his mannerisms then, it must have seemed painfully clear to onlookers. In fact, it was my recounting of a trip to Fauchon in Paris, to pick up his favored
Melange des Isles tricolor peppercorns, that elicited my mother’s revelation. (...)
The truth was that even as I wanted to harbor a Shakespearean grudge against my father, I was warmed by his accidental revelation. I thought about how he had grown up very alone, in a conservative family during the conservative fifties. How he had no one he could speak frankly to until he met my mother working on the original production of
Hair. The day after my dinner at Pastis, I decided to drop by my father’s apartment. I found him on the couch watching
Molto Mario. I sat down and joined him. He fixed us drinks, negronis. “Like sitting at Tre Scalini on the Piazza Navona,” he said.
We came to love this great ginger Falstaff, the medium through whom we were reconnecting, as a member of our extended family. He cooked with the same giddiness as my father—dropping in references to Proust, telling stories about visiting markets in Abruzzo or wineries in the Castelli, and stirring our romance for food along with his braising liquid. “Marsala means port of Allah,” he would say, and my father would light up like a four year old. “Isn’t that wonderful?” he’d say, and sip his gin. When the travel edition
, Mario Eats Italy, entered the mix, my Dad and I were, as he would say, in hog heaven. Every day Batali cooked in his cliffside villa outside Positano before trooping around the Amalfi coast for lemons the size of grapefruit, glistening crustaceans, and bright, metallic, deep-sea swimmers to cook on the beach.
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