Daughters & Dinner Rolls

When I had reached what my daddy liked to call The Age Of Sufficient Maturity - nearly beyond the rebellious teenage years but still with both feet planted firmly on this side of the door to adulthood -
he liked to take me to dinner at Boston's elegant Parker House, known as much for it's discretion as it's famous dinner rolls.

Here we would sit under soft lighting and exchange stories of our days. He was still a young man then, just in his late forties, with dark hair and a reassuring smile, a handsome man in a three piece dark suit, still in the habit of wearing cuff links. He loved really good scotch whiskey and drank Chivas from a heavy crystal glass although never more than two and frequently neglecting to finish the second. I drank ginger ale with lemon and felt immensely grown up - I had been redeemed from my past life of sin and shame, courtesy of a marriage license, and these dinners were sometimes faintly apologetic - he wanted to put things right now that I was back in the good graces of the family, his non appalled side wanted to understand and forgive. He had been, he admitted, too harsh and he regretted it, after all I was very nearly a grown woman and entitled to make my own mistakes. Perhaps, he suggested, We've both learned something.

Perhaps, I agreed, thinking that we'd both paid a higher than imagined price for my standing my ground. I'd never wasted a single moment on my mother's public outcry of shame and humiliation at what she referred to as her tramp daughter's behavior but I had always hated disappointing him and I knew he'd been caught on a narrow edge between his love for me and his fundamental values. Not knowing about the woman on the side, the illicit affair that he'd been discreetly having for years, I thought I had severely tested his moral compass - with a little more knowledge, I might have been a little less generous, a little less grateful to have his company again. Then again, I might have embraced the idea as I did when I finally learned of it. I'd campaigned for him to divorce my mother for years and never got more than a patient and sad You'll understand when you're older smile.

Try your oysters, he advised, the only rule of these dinners being that I was to try something new each time, something that on my own I'd never have dreamed of ordering. I'd been introduced to zucchini, Camenbert, sweetbreads (distressing when I learned what they were), escargot (pass!),
horseradish, curry, cheesecake - and was currently in an oyster phase - raw, smoked, fried, and what was to become my all time favorite, Rockefeller. We finished with Boston Cream Pie as only The Parker House could make it and coffee, subtly (and illegally) laced with the smallest amount of brandy, covertly added behind the closed doors of the kitchen and never mentioned by a soul. One memorable night, we saw Buddy Ebsen at a corner table, wearing a huge bib and eating lobster with drawn butter. Long before his hillbilly television days, my daddy whispered to me, he had been a hugely popular song and dance man - not Astaire or Kelly, but famous and well known in his own right, almost - but for an allergy to aluminum dust - The Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. ( Later I looked this up, not completely trusting my handsome but sometimes prone to take advantage of my trusting nature, parent - it turned out to be true.)

Both my daddy and Buddy Ebsen are gone now but The Parker House, under new ownership but as elegant and discreet as ever, still stands and serves. I'd be willing to wager that fathers still take daughters ( and maybe other women as well ) there for coffee and conversation, cream pie and dinner rolls.