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261 C H A P T E R E I G H T E E N THE EMPRESS’S LAST LEVÉE DAD’S EVERY MOMENT HAD BEEN GIVEN TO PROLONGING HIS LIFE AND Mom’s every moment was lived as if she were immortal. Fetal lamb cells on his side and slabs of richly marbled meat on hers; a few years of cigars versus a lifetime of cigarettes; daily exercise versus a largely sedentary life (except when the helicopter flew her to the duck blind): the scales leaned his way and Mom died a year and a half before Dad. In Dad’s passing I found myself reconciled to him in ways I had not anticipated. Mom proved a bigger challenge. There was much to admire, first and foremost her presence, her ability to be present. There is no road ahead, it has been said, we make the road as we go. Always here, now, my mother lived this wisdom in her business career. Ruth Fertel had no foresight, no master plan. But she had presence and she had guts. She built her empire by accident, always responding to the present moment, improvising like Huck Finn on his raft. Like Huck she went “a good deal on instinct.” A fire closed her first restaurant and in one week, she turned her catering hall four blocks away into a restaurant twice the size. A good customer proposes that he open a franchise near Baton Rouge and by 1999, when the company was sold, Mom had opened restaurants from Manhattan to Hong Kong, and from Cancún to Seattle— more than eighty-five restaurants selling millions of pound-size steaks and annual sales topping a third of a billion dollars. THE EMPRESS’S LAST LEVÉE 262 Mom managed to turn her lack of foresight into a strength. Most impressive of all, needing $18,000 Mom was talked into borrowing $22,000 and bought a restaurant and had the working capital to make a go of it. Thirty-four years later she sold her company for a low nine figures. My mother seized every opportunity as they came or as they were put before her and cobbled them into a large life. Much to her credit, she achieved it with a commitment to equality. She rarely pulled rank in the dining room or kitchen, a signal achievement for someone who was raised by a father who told her that she “hung the moon.” In 1997, when Mom turned seventy, she visited forty-two of her restaurants to smell out how they’re doing. True to form, when Mom saw folks working hard in one of her kitchens and needing help, she rolled up her sleeves and started peeling shrimp. Mom’s assumption of equality was real, but it was also a generous sleight of hand. Behind the corporate scenes, she shone for herself alone. For all the abundance at Ruth’s Chris tables, the corporate culture, like the family culture, was one of scarcity. Mom reserved the glory for herself. After quitting, Ralph bitterly made this point in a letter to my mother. He wondered about all of the people who helped make her the national figure she took great pride in becoming. They were now all on the outside looking in, wondering why she never acknowledged their contributions, and why she abandoned their friendship. Ralph felt it was he who had taken the business from “a Mom operation,” as he called it, to the nation’s largest upscale restaurant. From his point of view, he had always stayed in the background and let her accept the accolades. It galled him that, receiving every possible award they could possibly win, he had yet to hear her mention his name publicly. Even ever-placid Uncle Sig had been driven into a rage when his sister passed him over for the second New Orleans Ruth’s Chris, just up the road from Happy Jack.“Why did they have to compete so hard?”Aunt Helen had wondered aloud. Mom’s glee at winning was so infectious she could almost charm you into forgetting that you’d just been beaten in her zero-sum game. This five foot two blond exulted in being top gun on the duck or dove hunt, top rod on the fishing trip, and top hand at the card table—and left you feeling charmed, for a while. True, it got a bit old when she insisted on beating you (and...

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