Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 43, No. 4. Whole No. 245, April 1964

Twenty-Four Petits Fours by M. F. K. Fisher

Grand Guignol in miniature, as petits fours are cakes in miniature — petit guignol that will stay etched in your memory.

Professor Lucien Revenant felt almost light-headed to be up and about again after his tedious illness. For two days now, he decided with a prim little smile, it was as if he had taken a new lease on life. Suddenly, exactly 46 hours ago, he had begun to feel better instead of worse, well instead of ill.

He looked carefully at the weather outside before putting on his winter topcoat and his brown plaid scarf; that was one of the boring things about being very old — the necessary preoccupation with wind and cold... and of course he must be especially careful...

He could not afford to lose any more time on his thesis, which he had been polishing and rewriting for enough years to become almost legendary in the small American college where he had taught since he was a comparatively young man. His habit was to get everything ready to send off once more to the printers, and then, to the delight and exasperated amusement of his colleagues on the faculty, to withdraw it again — to change, they swore, a comma here and a semicolon there.

Work on the great thesis had come to a painful standstill with his illness, and he had spent most of the time since the sudden cessation of his weakness, exhaustion, and pain in putting his big study-table into good order again, ready for hard concentration tomorrow. Meanwhile, he was going to give a little party, here in his familiar shabby lodgings.

It would be a kind of reunion — of five dear people whom he had neglected as they all grew older and more preoccupied in their own dwindling powers. It was the damnable weather, surely, that most hindered the senescent: the constant fear of drafts and of slipping on wet pavements or on bathroom floors, the hazardous burden of breathing into cold winds. We sit by our fires, he admitted regretfully.

But today Professor Revenant defied this creaking cosiness that seemed to envelop them all. He had arranged everything by telephone, after a busy morning. Everyone could come, and the new strength in his own voice seemed to imbue them with quick liveliness — so that Rachel Johnson had sounded almost like a girl again, and Mrs. Mac too.

There would be four men, then, and two ladies — a reunion of classical proportions, almost Greek, he told himself as he closed his door on the new tidiness of his bed-sitting room and walked carefully down the carpeted stairs of the old boarding house.

Outside it was colder than he had guessed from his warm inside view, but he pulled his hat well down over his shiny head, and walked more briskly than he had for many years toward the shopping district of the little town. There were few people on the streets. He recognized a couple of his graduate students, but they hurried past him, their faces buried between their shoulders against the chill wind.

He would go first to the Buon Gusto. He remembered that faculty wives had told him, before he grew too tired to accept their invitations to dinner, that the best little cakes in town came from this small bakery. It was too bad, he thought in a remote way, that he had never taken time enough from his classes and from his thesis to learn such details personally: he might have had a few tea parties himself, with some of his prettiest students nibbling and tittering in his chaste room. He smiled again primly.

The bakery shop was delightfully warm. He stood looking seriously at the glass cases piled with cakes and cookies, and felt the welcome air against his dry cold skin, and even in behind his ears, until a solid black-browed woman by the cash register asked how she could help him. He cleared his throat. It had been some time since he last spoke with anyone.

“Oh, yes,” he said hastily. “Yes. I need, some little cakes. For a tea party this afternoon — that is, not tea exactly, but there will be ladies present. In fact, it is a rather special occasion, and I wish the best you have, which I can see is excellent.”

He was astonished to hear himself so wordy. It must be the sudden convalescence, the quick recovery, perhaps the warm shop after that cold wind. To cover his vague embarrassment, he rattled on while the woman looked patiently and kindly at him. It was lucky the shop was otherwise empty, she thought: he was one of those talky old fellows who liked to take his time.

“I had in mind something decorated,” he said, frowning. “It is a kind of reunion we are having, after a long absence. All of us so busy, you know. In fact, we may even start a little club this afternoon and plan regular meetings.”

“That would be real nice,” she said. “Ladies like these little petits fours.”

“Petits fours!” he exclaimed. “Precisely! I used to buy them in Paris for my dear mother’s ‘afternoons.’ Thursdays, always. Very old ladies came, it seemed to me then.” He laughed a little creakily, being out of practice. “But of course we are rather elderly too. Not you, Madame, but my friends this afternoon. Yes, petits fours are just what we need.”

“They are easy to chew, too,” she said. “No nuts.”

Professor Revenant chuckled in an elaborately conspiratorial way which amazed him, but which was very enjoyable. “Ah, yes,” he almost whispered. “I understand what you mean, exactly! Geriatrical gastronomy, eh?”

She smiled (a real nice old gentleman, and such a cute accent!), and opened the case which held the tiny squares of cake covered with fancy icings: rosebuds on pistachio green, white scrolls on chocolate, yellow buttercups on orange and pink.

“These are our specialty — made with pure butter,” she said. “How many?”

The professor discussed with her the fact that there would be only six at his party, but that they appreciated good food when they saw it and would no doubt be a little hungry.

“Figure on four apiece then,” she decided for him, and in a few minutes he went out with the box of twenty-four petits fours dangling carefully from a solid string over his thick woolen glove. He felt buoyant (a very pleasant young woman, and so helpful and understanding!), and his feet hardly seemed to touch the ground.

He turned toward the liquor store nearest his house, so that he would not have to carry the bottle too far: the air hurt his chest a little, and he wished to be at his best, later on.

Somewhat regretfully he asked for a bottle of good sherry. With Rachel and Mrs. Mac to be there, sherry was indicated. What was it his dear mother always offered to the occasional old gentlemen who came to her afternoons? Marsala? Madeira? It was brown and sweet, he remembered from what he used to steal from the bottoms of the glasses... Then recklessly he asked for a bottle of good scotch as well: it would please old Dr. Mac. In fact, it would taste very good to anyone who wanted it, as the Professor did, suddenly.

“Sure we can’t deliver this, Mr. — uh? It’s kind of heavy.” The clerk looked worriedly at the old man.

“Thank you, no,” Professor Revenant said with firmness; he must keep all these supplies under his personal control.

He walked more slowly than before with the two bottles carefully pressed under one arm, and the box of little cakes dangling from his hand, and by the time he reached the boarding house and walked up the familiar wooden front steps, he felt a little hint of his late fatigue creep into him. He shook himself in the dim hall, rather like a bony old dog, and went one at a time up the stairs to his room. An inner excitement reassured him: this would be a good party, worth all the effort and expense, all the weariness.

As he hung his coat neatly in the closet, with his scarf in the right-hand pocket where it had been every winter all these years, and his gloves in the left-hand pocket, he looked approvingly at the big round study-table, cleared now of most of the papers and book catalogues that had piled up during his wretched illness. He had brushed all but the inkstains off the dark red cover, and had brought up six wine glasses from the back of his landlady’s cupboard where she kept them for christenings and wakes, and a big hand-painted china plate.

He would put Rachel facing the door, in a faint subtle effort to make her know that if he had only had enough money and had managed to finish the thesis, he might well have asked her to share her life with him and be his hostess. But even before it could be, it had seemed too late. He sighed: too late; yet only some forty-eight hours ago he had realized that nothing need be too late. Rachel had sounded so young and warm and sweet on the telephone.

On one side of her he would put Dr. Mac, the old reprobate. Anyone who had sailed on as many ships and lived in as many foreign ports as he had would break even the ice of their many years of separation — just so long as he did not drink too deeply of the ceremonial scotch. But Mrs. Mac had a way with her, deft from long practice, of keeping an eye on the bottle.

Then on Rachel’s other side would be Harry Longman. Rachel liked eccentrics, and Harry surely was that: a well adjusted garage mechanic with a degree in engineering and a Ph.D. and a history of countless liaisons behind him, even in his ripe old years, all with young girls who worked in candy stores. It was the sweets he loved, he always boasted, and he was as round and sane as a butterscotch kiss himself.

Then Mrs. Mac would sit between Harry Longman and Judge Greene, and he himself would sit next to Dr. Mac. It suddenly seemed important to him to let Rachel be the lostess and not to be the host himself, facing her boldly across the red tablecover and the glasses and the little petits fours. And that way Mrs. Mac could keep an eye on Dr. Mac and still flirt a little with the Judge, who was the kind of austere man who said very witty things in a low detached voice.

Professor Revenant put the petits fours in diminished circles on the dreadful hand-painted plate, as soon as his own hands had unstiffened in the warm room. The colors looked pretty: the little pastries in their stiff white fluted cups were like flowers, and he made a centerpiece of them. He uncorked the bottles, and debated whether to put two glasses with the sherry for the ladies, and four glasses with the scotch, and then decided against it: Harry might like sherry because it was so sweet.

For a minute he was sobered to realize that he had only five chairs, counting his bathroom stool and his own work chair. Then he slid the table toward his couch-bed, so that he could sit on that. It looked, he concluded, quite Bohemian.

It was almost time. He was beginning to feel the excitement like wine. What a fine idea of his, to call them together again after such a long dull dropping away!

He thought of how years ago they had used to meet often at the jolly hospitable Macs, all of them perhaps hiding from outside strictures as he was hiding from the faculty dinners — Rachel’s ancient mother, the Judge’s drear and empty house, even Harry’s sweet-sick diet of lollipops.

It might be a good idea to pour himself a little nip, a wee drop, to warm him before the fire of life took over again. He looked with another smile, not prim this time, at the pretty table waiting for the reunion, the beginning of a better and warmer time with his long-absent but still dear friends, and he considered first the bottle of sherry and then the bottle of scotch.

He decided to eat one of the petits fours on the little waiting center-piece and then pretend not to be hungry when they came.

He had not seen the Macs and Harry and the Judge, and the sweet Rachel, since their funerals. His own, that morning, had been boring: only the priest and an altar boy and the head of the French Department had been there.

He would clear off the empty plate and glasses tomorrow, and get to work on his thesis, this time definitively...