Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
September/October 1988 | Volume 39, Issue 6
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
September/October 1988 | Volume 39, Issue 6
The dinner party is the ultimate celebration of what it means to be civilized,” my father used to say. “There is nothing better in this world than to settle down around a lovely table and eat good food and say interesting things with one’s friends. ”
When I was growing up, or thought I was, in Buffalo before World War II, Saturday-night dinner parties were an essential element in my parents’ lives. They spent a lot of time talking about them, going to them, and giving them. Time and again my sister and brother and I would come home from sledding in Delaware Park to find an extra maid clucking in the kitchen, polishing the silver, teetering on a stepladder to get at the good china, while the cook distractedly set out soup and sandwiches for us on the kitchen table before she returned to basting the great, sizzling roast of beef in the oven or shelling the fresh green peas.
We children couldn’t go into the living room the night of a party, but we could see from the doorway that someone had already neatened up the copies of Life in the magazine rack, and tucked the sheet music back in the piano bench, and laid out the Chesterfields in the cut-glass cigarette boxes. There would be a screen in front of the dining-room door, but we could still catch a glimpse of the lace tablecloth and the curly candlesticks and the blue and silver salt dishes, with the little spoons, that spilled so easily and fresh flowers and the twelve crystal water goblets that came from Cooperstown. It all looked as sacred and mysterious as the altar at Trinity Church, where we’d go the next day if our parents weren’t too tired.
For most of the evening the strange, exotic sounds of the dinner party would waft upstairs, punctuating our radio programs and finally even penetrating our dreams: the ring of the doorbell, the greetings in the front hall, the rhythmic rattle of the cocktail shaker, the buzzer in the kitchen indicating they were “almost” ready to eat, the oohs and aahs and muffled slidings of