The Potato Leek Soup of Ellen Garnis
The other day, engaged in yet another make-work pandemic activity, I sorted through a formidable pile of a half-century’s worth of scribbled recipes. One in particular, for potato leek soup, caught my attention. (You’ll find the complete recipe at the end of this essay.) It was scrawled in pencil on a piece of scrap paper in distinctly old-fashioned European cursive. I recognized it immediately.
In 1983 my wife Cecily and I discovered Ellen Garnis at the culmination of a nanny search for our infant daughter, Kate, who is now a parent herself. At the time, we were renting the third floor of a house on a hill in Winchester, Massachusetts. Cecily was a general contractor rehabbing condos in Boston’s North End and I was a violinist with the Boston Symphony. On days that I had to rehearse in the morning and/or afternoon, we needed someone we could rely on to provide trustworthy childcare. Cecily had the brainstorm to interview some of the retired folks who were involved with various activities at the local Jenks Center for seniors. Our list of potential candidates included one Ellen Garnis, highly recommended by the center.
We called Ellen and made an appointment for her to come to our house for an interview on a wintry morning at 8:00a.m. At 7:59 a senior Mary Poppins in calf-length gray skirt and button-down wool sweater marched up Vine Street, back ramrod straight, a furled umbrella her personal alpenstock. The doorbell rang at 8:00. We already liked Ellen. She introduced herself with a curious, musical, European accent. Gentle authority. “And now where is Katie?” she asked, looking around. Removing her shoes, she got down on the floor on her hands and knees and started playing with and talking to Kate. Cecily and I were forgotten by both Ellen and Kate. Ellen was hired.
Little by little we got to know Ellen better. When she came to our house we made tea, or when time permitted we treated her to a Viennese pastry at Franz’s European bakery in the center of town. One of the first things we found out was the origin of her interesting accent. She was a native of Latvia but then, before coming to America, lived for some years in Australia.
Ellen was a true nature lover, and it wasn’t long before Cecily and I found ourselves trying to keep up with her while she held Kate’s hand, traipsing along one of the many trails in the Fels, the local wooded reservoir. A very knowledgeable amateur horticulturist, she was fond of telling us the Linnaean nomenclature of any wildflower that we passed. In winter, when trails were snow-covered, she regularly cross-country skied on her own for the exercise. This she continued to do well into her seventies.
Ellen never cared about wealth. Although she had an attractive house in a nice part of Winchester, which is on the whole an affluent community, on our first visit to her home we saw that it was in need of some serious maintenance and repair. Her house was filled with stuff: used scraps of paper and cardboard on which she practiced her elegant calligraphy–she was regularly hired to create invitations for local shindigs, and helped get my sister interested in the craft–dusty knickknacks to remind her of an old adventure, some of which she would gift to Kate and later to her little brother Jacob, which they would receive with awe and delight; photographs of family and friends (and of course, Kate) in inexpensive frames or no frames; comfortable but well-worn furniture which could have benefitted from a little sprucing up. Nothing fancy. Fancy was not in Ellen’s vocabulary. Fancy was a waste of money. Ellen was a born forager, a born survivor, as were the neighborhood feral cats, like Pickles, who were attracted by the ever-present bowl of milk on her doorstep and who meandered through her home.
Ellen’s reputation for integrity and for having a green thumb was locally renowned, and from spring through fall she routinely housesat and tended the gardens for wealthy clientele when they vacationed. That’s how she derived a little spending money and her summer exercise. The gardens inevitably bloomed more profusely by the time the owners returned.
Ellen was also the community mushroom expert and consultant, but she never divulged the exact location of the most prized specimens for which she foraged in the Fels. Sometimes she sold her discoveries to a local market or restaurant. On other occasions Ellen would arrive on our doorstep, a brown paper bag in hand, and with great delight she would present us with some monstrous fungi that she had dug up. One of them she called Laetiporus sulphureus, chicken of the forest. “Sliced, sautéed with butter and a little salt,” she recommended. Maybe it was the one thing that didn’t actually taste like chicken, but it was better. We never considered the possibility of an accidental poisonous mushroom; Ellen would never allow anything bad to happen to us, especially to Kate.
Ellen came from a highly educated and cultured background. She loved classical music, so occasionally I got her tickets to Boston Symphony Friday matinees since she couldn’t afford them, and she would be my passenger for the twenty-minute commute down I-93 from Winchester to Symphony Hall. For her, these escorted cultural outings were very prestigious affairs. Ellen never had a car of her own. She never learned to drive, fully content to walk or take the train. Always frugal, later compulsively so, she considered a car an unnecessary luxury.
After we moved from Winchester to Beverly, almost an hour away, it became impractical for Ellen to continue to be our nanny. We continued to visit her, though, and occasionally brought her home with us for a walk on the nearby beach with Kate and Jake. On one such occasion she brought us a house gift, one of her adopted cats, a calico named Fritzie. Like Ellen, he was independent and a little haughty—a survivor. He made himself at home immediately, and soon thereafter, to show his appreciation for our hospitality, Fritzie proudly carried a live writhing snake into our living room, depositing it at our feet. Like Ellen, Fritzie was a born naturalist.
Ellen always bragged about her healthy life style—how she never had a cold in her life—chalking it up to her abstinence from alcohol and to her European folk remedies. She used to stick some vile black stuff up her nose whenever she felt a cold coming on and insisted I try it. “Sure,” I said. From then on I made certain not to exhibit any symptoms of illness in front of Ellen regardless of how miserable I felt. The black stuff may still be somewhere in my medicine cabinet.
In addition to learning about her home cures, over the years we also learned about Ellen’s past. How, during World War II, her beloved native Latvia was squeezed by Nazis from the west and by Soviets from the east. How, in order to fool the invaders, she learned to speak fluent German and Russian, all along despising the people whose tongues she mimicked so well. There was a funny story she often told me—a little bit different each time, though maybe it’s my own memory that fails me—about how either the German or Russian ambassador had mistakenly concluded she was an intelligence agent because of her linguistic acumen. Her versions of the story became more grandiose and blurrier over time: In the last edition, she had fooled the entire Soviet Foreign Service.
After the war and before Soviet control was consolidated, Ellen fled Latvia to Australia with her husband and two little boys, living in the muck of a Tasmanian refugee camp, surrounded by vermin and poisonous snakes. The boys caught ferrets and trained them to hunt. The family managed to survive there, but little more than that. They ultimately immigrated by ship to the U.S. I’m guessing it was in the 1950s. Her husband died of some illness in transit. I don’t remember what he did for a living—I vaguely recall he was a scientist or a doctor. She never talked much about him, but I sensed that was due to highly personal private thoughts, not negative ones.
Ellen had spoken at greater length and bitterness about how the younger of her two sons had died. Enlisted in the U.S. military, according to Ellen he had been denied anti-depression medication and committed suicide. That story, too, seemed to change over time and my memory for details isn’t anything to write home about, either. But, as in all of her stories, Ellen was right and everyone else was wrong. The enemy. Maybe the “us versus them” attitude, growing in Ellen like cancer as she aged, was what eventually led to the estrangement between her and her remaining son, Martin. After Martin died from leukemia, the only kin Ellen had left were her daughter-in-law and little grandson.
After we left Boston and moved to Salt Lake City in 1988, time and the hidden burdens of life caught up with Ellen. As her mind slowly began to wander in unfathomable directions, Ellen, who had always been frugal in the best sense, saving whatever could be reasonably reused, began to take delight scavenging loose change on the supermarket parking lot, to the point that the search for it became an obsession. She would show me, in the palm of her outstretched hand and with a look of triumph far out of proportion to her accomplishment, the eight or nine cents of treasure she had salvaged, deriding those so wasteful as to allow money to escape their pockets and end up in hers.
Ellen became incapable of maintaining her house. It was sold and she moved into a low-income apartment from which she was eventually evicted, and transferred to the Winchester Rehabilitation and Nursing Center.
How does one calculate the value of a friendship? I asked myself that question as I watched Ellen in her nursing home bed, uncertain she was still among the living. It was Easter Sunday, 2000. My one free day on a business trip to Boston had given me an opportunity to see Ellen, and I had little doubt this would be our final visit. Earlier that winter, someone from the home had called me in Salt Lake City, politely informing me they didn’t expect Ellen to live more than a few days. Several months later, she still clung tenaciously to life. Ellen was like that. Though a few years earlier, on my previous visit to the Boston area, she had been able to manage on her own, age had finally overtaken her. Now, other than going through the motions of being fed, cleaned, and medicated, Ellen demonstrated virtually no signs of cognitive life.
When I arrived at the nursing home, I asked the receptionist where to find Ellen. A little confusion at first—for some reason everyone there called her Ella. “Ella is in Room Fourteen, just down the hall to the left.” I knocked, waited a reasonable amount of time, and walked in. Ellen lay asleep in bed in fetal position, surrounded by quietly humming medical contraptions. Of slight build during the best of times, she had withered away inside her nightgown, making it seem tent-like. Blue veins formed a marbled network over her transparent ivory skin; her white hair, wispy and unkempt, was no longer done up in the familiar tight bun.
I glanced around Room Fourteen. Institutional furniture. No photos, no knickknacks, no art, no books. Nothing personal. Nothing Ellen. Nothing one could be attached to except for the tubes surrounding her hospital bed. There was no one else in the room, and as Ellen was sleeping I rummaged around the closet for something that might have been carted from her former apartment that would provide some cheer and color. I unearthed a few old photos and a carton of threadbare clothes, but decided the latter should just as well remain in the closet. She wouldn’t be wearing them anytime soon. I sat in the wheelchair next to the bed and began a one-way conversation. I reminisced about that time we first met, about everything I knew of her past, and of how much she meant to our family. She didn’t seem to hear me, but there was no way to know for sure and this was my last chance before she departed this world. Any minute now?
Ellen was still sleeping, and I had some time on my hands, so I went to a nearby Kmart to buy an inexpensive AM-FM-cassette-tape-CD boombox, some self-standing picture frames, and a cheery Easter bouquet from a nearby florist.
When I returned, I arranged the flowers in a vase on the dresser so that when she awakened it would be directly in front of her. Wishful thinking perhaps, since she had become almost totally blind; maybe, I hoped, she was still able to discern bright colors. I placed a framed photo of her family on the windowsill next to the bed so that if she couldn’t see it at least she could hold it. I framed an old photo of my family I found in Ellen’s dresser, stuck in some recent wallet photos of Kate and Jake, and placed this makeshift triptych on the sill—a little bit closer than the other photos.
Ellen hadn’t moved since I had arrived. Her fragility was striking, and I was wondering what might make such a life worth living when I noticed a tree, blooming with a profusion of pink flowers, outside the window of her antiseptic hospital room. There was some connection there that I needed to think about.
Clearing off a night table of some medical gadgets and with some difficulty locating an electric outlet that wasn’t involved with Ellen’s lifeline, I plugged in the boombox. After setting the FM dial to the classical music station for later use, I inserted a CD of my own string quartet performing Mendelssohn and Dvořák with the volume on soft, not knowing if there were rules for playing music at the nursing home.
A nurse walked in. Feeding time. She suggested I step outside so that when she roused Ellen she could break the news gently that there was a visitor for her. That way Ellen wouldn’t be alarmed. Not that the nurse expected Ellen, in her condition, could be alarmed by anything.
“Ella, a friend is here to see you,” I heard from outside the room. I took my cue and reentered. The head of the bed had been raised to facilitate feeding. The nurse was holding a spoonful of what looked like baby food to Ellen’s mouth. Ellen’s teeth were in a glass next to the boombox. Was it my imagination or did Ellen have that old look of defiance toward the nurse that she conjured up every time she spoke with such scorn of Nazis or Communists? If, against all odds it was not my imagination, I supposed it was a good sign.
Ellen sensed movement, diminished eyesight notwithstanding, and turned her head toward me. She became agitated, making indecipherable, mumbly, guttural, clicking sounds. Was she having a seizure? I looked anxiously at the nurse who, inexplicably, seemed quite pleased. She told me that this was the most responsive Ellen has been in months and it was her way of communicating. “Ella must really like you!” she said. I asked if it would help the conversation if Ella’s teeth were put back in. The nurse said that Ella had lost the ability to speak a year ago so it wouldn’t make a difference.
I sat beside Ellen and gingerly held her hand, which lacked all its former strength. It might have been my imagination yet again but I got the sense that she felt embarrassed for me to see her so disheveled and undressed, as she pulled compulsively at her nightgown with her bird claw of a hand. She used to take great pains to look Old World prim and proper in her carefully mended clothes, never exposing any more skin than necessary. Just as Ellen always had had a tendency to shy away from physical contact, even in her best of days, I’ve felt her similar reticence at expressing deep emotions verbally, even in writing. I hoped this handholding, perhaps the only means of contact she could perceive, would more strongly transmit the depth of love that my entire family had for her, and would always have, than whatever words I could come up with.
I began to talk to her as if we were having an ordinary chat. I told her about Kate and Jake—how grown up they’d become. Teenagers! Can you believe that? I reminded her about the time she half tongue-in-cheek sent me a dozen red roses, the cost of which for her must have seemed a fortune, after I took her to a particular Boston Symphony concert. “My date!” she had gloated. About the gold ruble coin she gave to Kate on her second birthday. “Yes, of course it’s real gold!” “Ellen, we couldn’t!” “It’s not for you. It’s for Katie.” About how she had despised Hans, our old landlord in Winchester, claiming–not without some justification–that he was lazy and a welfare chiseler. About how in Latvian her name, Garnis, means “crane,” that regal bird, which she had proudly explained to me on more than one occasion. Ellen continued to click and mumble gibberish and pull at her nightgown. I tried not to cry.
Ellen appeared to be tiring. I decided to leave, reassuring her I’d visit again. I extricated her hand from mine—had she been trying to hold on?—and gave her as gentle a hug as possible. She was so frail, and her semi-upright position in bed made it so awkward to embrace her that I was afraid of falling on top of her. That image almost made me laugh. When I said goodbye I wondered whether her glazed eyes were moist from emotion or from medical condition. Halfway out the door I remembered what they always do in movies when someone loses the ability to speak—“squeeze my hand once if the answer is yes, twice if no”—and considered whether I should try that, but I decided not to go back.
Ellen Garnis died on June 13, 2000. Since then, in the intervening twenty years, I’ve made new friends and lost old ones. How does one calculate the value of a friendship? Perhaps by the extent to which we try to keep its memory alive.
Here is Ellen’s potato leek soup recipe. It’s delicious.
