“Sure an’ he’s no more nor less than a human earthquake,” Michael reported after an examination.
Nancy applied ice caps and hot-water bags to the afflicted areas without avail. The stricken man had struggled from his bed in the Twentieth Street lodging-house that he had chosen for his habitation, and staggered through the heavy morning heat to his post in the basement kitchen of Nancy’s Inn, there to collapse ignominiously between his cooking ranges. With Molly and Dolly and Hildeguard at his feet and herself and Michael and a dishwasher at his head they had managed to get him up the two short flights of stairs. It developed that it would be necessary to remove him in an 114 ambulance later in the day, but for the time being he lay like a contorted Colossus on the fragile-looking cot that constituted his improvised bed of pain: “Like the great grandfather,” to quote Michael again, “of all of them Zeus’es and gargoyles, and other cavortin’ gentlemen in the yard down-stairs.”
With the luncheon menu before her, Nancy decided that the hour had come for her to prove herself. She had assumed the practical management of the business of the Inn only to have the responsibility and much of the authority of her position taken from her by the very efficiency of her staff. She was far too good a business woman not to realize that this condition was distinctly to her advantage, and to encourage it accordingly, but there was still so much of the child in her that she secretly resented every usurpation of privilege.
With Gaspard ill she was able to manipulate the affairs of the kitchen exactly as she chose, and even in the moment of applying the “hot at the base of the brain and the cold at the forehead” that the doctor had prescribed as the most effective method for relieving the 115 pressure of blood in the tortured temples of the suffering man, she had been conscious of that thrill of triumph that most human beings feel when the involuntary removal of the man higher up invests them with power.
Michael did the marketing, and the list went through as Gaspard had planned it, with some slight adaptations to the exigency, such as the substitution of twenty-five cans of tomato soup for the fresh vegetables with which Gaspard had planned to make his tomato bisque, and brandied peaches in glass jars instead of peach soufflé.
“If I allow myself a little handicap in the matter of details,” she said, “I know I can put everything else through as well as Gaspard;” whereupon she enveloped herself in a huge linen apron, tucked her hair into one of the chef’s white caps, and attacked the problem of preparing luncheon for from sixty-five to two hundred people, who were scheduled to appear at uncertain intervals between the hours of twelve and two-thirty. Later she must be ready to serve tea and ices to a problematical number of patrons, but she tried not to think beyond the immediate task.
She could make a very good tomato bisque by adding one cup of milk and a dash of cream to one half-pint can of MacDonald’s tomato soup, enough to serve three people adequately, and she proceeded to multiply that recipe by twenty-five. She didn’t think of getting large cans till Michael in the process of opening the half-pint tins made the belated suggestion, which she greeted with some hauteur.
“I’m not the person to mind a little extra work, Michael, when I am sure of my results. Precision—that’s the secret of the difference between American and French cooking.”
“An’ sure and I fail to see the difference between the preciseness of a quart can and four half-pint ones, but I suppose it’s my ignorance now.”