thick with night insects to find even a
PERSONAL HISTORY
THE LAMB ROAST
What was cooking at our place.
BY GABRIELLE HAMILTON
The author’s father (left) and a family friend roasting lambs, around 1970.
W e threw a party. The same party,
every year, when I was a kid. It
was a spring-lamb roast, and we laid out
four or five whole little guys over an open
fire and invited more than a hundred
people. Our house was in rural Pennsyl-
vania and was not really a house at all but
a wild castle built into the ruins of a nine-
teenth-century silk mill. Our back yard
was not a regular yard but a meandering
meadow, with wild geese and a creek
running through it. It was a lush setting.
The beer, wine, and soda chilled in the
creek, and the weeping willows bent their
branches down over the water. We
would braid a bunch together to make a
kind of Tarzan rope to swing on, out over
the stream in bathing suits and laceless
sneakers, and land in the creek.
34 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 17, 2011
plugged-in Coke machine. Outside
In our town, you could walk back
and forth between two states by cross-
ing the Delaware River. On weekend
mornings, we piled in the car and ate
breakfast at Smutzie’s, in New Jersey,
then filled up the tank at Sam Wil-
liams’s Mobil, in Pennsylvania. After
school, I walked to Jersey and got les-
sons at Les Parsons’s music shop. My
home town has become, mostly, a
sprawl of developments and subdivi-
sions, gated communities that look like
movie sets that will be taken down at
the end of the shoot. But, when I was
young, it was mostly farmland—rolling
fields, rushing creeks when it rained,
thick woods, and hundred-year-old
stone barns. You had to ride your bike
about a mile down a dark country road
Cal’s Collision Repair, that machine
glowed like something almost religious.
I was the youngest of five, and we ran
in a pack—to school, home from school,
and out after dinner—like wild dogs. If
the Melman kids were allowed out, and
the Bentley boys, the Drevers, and the
Shanks across the street as well, our group
numbered fifteen. We spent all of our
time outdoors, in mud suits, snowsuits, or
bare feet, depending on the weather.
Even in the benign woods, we found
rough pastimes. We trespassed, drag
raced, smoked, burgled, and vandalized.
We got ringworm, broken bones, tetanus,
concussions, stitches, and poison ivy.
My mother was French, and she
wore the sexy black cat-eye eyeliner of
the era, like Audrey Hepburn and So-
phia Loren. I remember the smell of
sulfur every morning as she lit a match
to warm the tip of her black wax pencil.
She pinned her dark hair back into a
tight, neat twist, and then spent the day
in a good skirt, high heels, and an apron.
She lived in our kitchen, ruled the house
with an oily wooden spoon in her hand,
and forced us to eat briny, wrinkled ol-
ives, small birds, and cheeses that looked
as if they might bear Legionnaires’ dis-
ease. She kicked our cat away from her
ankles and said, “Ah là là là là là là, the
problem with kittens is that they be-
come cats!” I sat in her aproned lap every
night after dinner and felt the treble of
her voice down my spine while breath-
ing in her exhale of wine, vinaigrette,
and tangerine.
More than thirty years ago, her
kitchen had a two-bin, stainless-steel
restaurant sink and a six-burner Gar-
land stove. Her burnt-orange Le Creu-
set pots and casseroles, scuffed and
blackened, were always filled with tails,
claws, and marrow-filled bones that she
was stewing and braising on the back
three burners. Our kitchen table was a
big round piece of butcher block where
we prepared and ate casual meals. My
mother knew how to get everything co-
mestible from a shin or neck of some
COURTESY HAMILTON FAMILY
animal, how to use a knife, how to cure
a cast-iron pan. She taught us to articu-
late the “s” in “niçoise” and “vichyssoise,”
so that we wouldn’t sound like other
Americans.
The lamb roast, though, was my fa-
 ther’s party. With a degree from the
Rhode Island School of Design, two
union cards in his wallet—stagehands
and scenic artists—five able-bodied chil-
dren, a French wife, and a photograph
torn from a magazine of two Yugoslav
men roasting a lamb over a pit, he cre-
ated a legendary party. People came
every year from as far away as New York
City and as near as our local elementary
school.
My dad could not cook. He was a set
designer for theatrical and trade shows,
and he had a “design-build” studio in
Lambertville, New Jersey, where he had
grown up, and where his own father had
been the local doctor. My father went
away to college and then to art school.
In 1964, he bought the old skating rink
at the end of South Union Street, with
its enormous domed ceiling and colos-
sal wooden floor, and turned it into his
studio, an open work space where scen-
ery as big as the prow of a ship could be
constructed, erected, painted, and then
broken down and shipped to New York.
He built the sets for the Ringling Broth-
ers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and
we would zip around on the dollies,
crashing into the legs of the chain-
smoking union carpenters and scenic
artists who were busy with band saws,
canvas, and paint. We ran up and down
mountains of rolled black and blue ve-
lour, laid out as if in a carpet store, and
shoved our arms down into fifty-gallon
oil drums full of glitter.
At the circus at Madison Square
Garden, we met Mishu, “the smallest
man in the world,” and petted the long
velvety trunks of the elephants in jew-
elled headdresses. We met Gunther, the
lion tamer, and marvelled at his blond
hair, deep tan, and amazing ass—high,
round, and firm, like two Easter hams—
in electric-blue tights.
W here the rest of us saw only the
empty, overgrown meadow be-
hind our house, riddled with ground-
hog holes, my father pictured a giant
pit, with four spring lambs roasting over
applewood coals, wood smoke hanging
in the moist summer air. He saw his
friends: artists and teachers and butch-
ers, with glasses in their hands. About
all of his work, he says, “Everybody else
does the bones and makes sure the thing
doesn’t fall down. I do the romance.”
36 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 17, 2011
The lamb roast wasn’t our only party.
For a Moroccan-themed party, he built
low couches from sheets of plywood and
covered them with huge fur blankets and
orange velour from the studio. There
were tapestries and kilims stacked as tall
as me, where adults stoned on spiced
wine and pigeon pies lounged. I remem-
ber walking from room to dimly lit room
acutely feeling the ethos of the era—the
early nineteen-seventies—as if it, too,
were sprawled out on the “scene shop”
couch in long hair and a macramé dress.
There was also a Russian Winter Ball,
for which my father had refrigerator-
size cartons of artificial snow shipped
in from Texas and rented a dry-ice ma-
chine to fog up the rooms, so it would
feel like a scene from “Doctor Zhivago.”
And there was a Valentine’s Day Lov-
ers’ Dinner, which finished with hun-
dreds of choux-paste éclair swans with
little pastry wings and necks, and sliv-
ered almond beaks which, when toasted,
turned perfectly black. My father set
them out swimming in pairs on a giant
Plexiglas mirror “pond,” with confec-
tioners’ sugar snowdrifts on the banks.
“Swans,” he said, “mate for life.”
The lamb roast was simple. We built
a fire in a shallow pit, about eight feet
long and six feet wide. At each end of
the pit, my dad and my oldest brother,
Jeffrey, set up a short wall of cinder blocks
with a heavy wooden plank on top, where
the long ash-wood poles bearing the
lambs would rest. The branches of an ash
tree grow so straight that you can easily
skewer a lamb with them.
Jeffrey had a 1957 Chevy truck, with
a wooden bed and a big blue mushroom
painted on its heavily Bondoed cab. The
day before the party, we drove out along
the winding roads, past Black’s Christ-
mas tree farm and the LaRue bottle
works. I rode in the bed of the truck, in
a cotton dress and boy’s shoes with no
socks, hanging on to the railing, letting
the wind blast my face. Even with my
eyes closed, I could tell by the little
patches of bracing coolness, and the
sudden bright warmth, and the smell of
manure when we were passing a hay
field, a long thick stand of trees, a stretch
of clover, or a horse farm. Finally, we
got to Johnson’s apple orchard, where
we picked up wood for the fire.
Johnson’s sold yellow peaches and
half a dozen kinds of apples in bushel
baskets. But it was too early in the year
to buy fruit. They had pruned the trees
for the season, and we filled the truck
with the trimmings, piling applewood
branches high above the truck bed,
which we’d extended with two eight-
foot sheets of plywood. This green
wood would burn long and hot, hissing
all night as the sap dripped down into
the flames. My father said, “That’ll burn
with the fragrance of its fruit, you see.”
We got the lambs at Maresca’s, the
Italian butchers up the road on the Jersey
side. Outside the shop were two huge
forsythia bushes, bursting with sunny
yellow flowers every spring. Inside, the
enamel refrigerated cases were packed
with hunks of whole meat, ground meat,
tied meat, and birds, whole and in parts.
On the long green tile wall behind the
cases, where the Marescas did their
bloody work, was a giant mural, in
friendly colors, of a fenced-in pasture,
with cottony white sheep and porky, “He’s got your trudge.”
bristle-less pink piggies, smiling while
sniffing yellow buttercups. In the center • •
of the pasture was a roly-poly, mustached
butcher in a clean white apron. To the
right of the mural, hanging from pegs, ing so the fat is marbled throughout.” parents probably hadn’t totally under-
were hacksaws, cleavers, and giant knives. Every time Joe opened the heavy stood this, either, because on the night
In the early seventies, there was no “ar- wooden door to the cooler, I caught an before the big party Jeffrey was left in
tisanal,” no “organic” or “free-range” or eyeful of carcasses hanging upside down charge of the fire. My brother Todd, the
“diver-picked” or “heirloom” anything. with their tongues flopping out the sides second oldest, would have preferred to be
The Marescas were just father-and-sons of their blood-flecked mouths and their in his room with the door closed, losing
butchers, working in a shop with sawdust bulging eyes filmed over, along with dis- himself in his electric guitar, his reel-to-
on the floor. embodied parts—legs, heads, haunches, reel tape recorder, his dual cassette deck,
Salvatore and his son Joe looked sides, ribs—looking like something in a his electric amplifier, and his new solder-
the part—with bulky flannel shirts un- Jack London story. I wanted to follow Joe ing iron. With coils of solder and copper
der their long jackets and aprons, and in there. I wanted to be with the meat and paper clips, he fashioned little sculptures
greasy, stained, catcher’s-mitt hands. the knives, and to wear the long bloody of boats, trains, and skiers. But now he lay
But Emil, the other son, looked as if he coat. in his sleeping bag, tuning us out, listen-
could have been a chemist in a lab, or a ing to Led Zeppelin on his headphones,
home-ec teacher—he wore an apron,
always, but with a V-neck sweater vest
over his flannel shirt and a pair of nice
T he night before the party, we slept by
the fire, four kids vaguely chaper-
oned by our brother Jeffrey. He routinely
which he had bought himself with the
money that he’d earned busking in town.
Simon, who was closest to me in age,
brown corduroys. He had wanted to be collected the deer and raccoons that had was in the middle of a preadolescent
a baseball player, I had heard, but ended been hit out on the country roads, and summer vandalism spree. Every cop car
up in the family business. dragged them back to hang from trees he saw was an opportunity to pour a
The Marescas could judge how old until they bled out. Then he cleaned the five-pound bag of white sugar in its gas
an animal was when it was slaughtered hides, burned off the hair, and made his tank. Glass panes in empty houses were
by touching the cartilage, what it was own pants. He scraped the sinew from gamely blown out with rocks. He was
fed and how often by examining the the bones and dried it, to make thread. I waiting until we all fell asleep so he
fat deposits and marbling in the meat. was enthralled by his artful, freakish hab- could walk into town and leave his mark
Pointing out a thick streak of fat in its and his boarding-school good looks, overnight. My sister, Melissa, the mid-
a side of beef, Joe said, “Here you which were dressed down by his new dle child, was so responsible as to have a
can see the lightning bolt where the habit of wearing dashikis. He was eleven lifeguarding job, which left a white
rancher started to feed him fast and years older, and I didn’t understand that wristwatch mark on her tanned arm.
furious at the end to fatten him up, there was likely a psychotropic reason he While we lay around the sparking pit,
but what you really want is steady feed- could go so long without blinking. My Jeffrey came up with a little language and
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 17, 2011 37
 a nomenclature for our family. He started
with my dad, “the Bone,” which some of
the carpenters at the scenery shop had re-
cently started calling my dad behind his
back. Ever since the eighth grade, school-
mates had changed Hamilton to Ham-
bone or just Ham. But someone clever
had finally come up with the Bone and it
had stuck. Have you seen the Bone?
Where’s the Bone? You better make sure
the Bone signed off on that.
From Pa-Pa Boner, the lewdness of
which can still put Jeffrey into a breath-
less laughing fit, it took nothing to get
us going, and soon we were dubbed,
from oldest to youngest, J Jasper Bone,
T-Bone, Bonette Major, Sly and the
Family Bone, and me, Bonette Minor.
Our battered Volvo station wagon be-
came the Bone Chariot. Something
uniquely my dad’s—like the malfunc-
tioning dimmer switches in our house, or
the house’s almost being auctioned off at
the sheriff’s sale, because he hadn’t paid the
property taxes in a year—was Bone-a fide.
Expensive champagne at Christmas de-
spite the lien was Bone-issimo. And my
dad’s parties became Bone-a-thons.
As the youngest, I didn’t really get
the joke, but I thrilled to be packed into
my sleeping bag right next to my sib-
lings. I felt cocooned by the smell of
wood smoke, the anchoring voices, gig-
gles, farts, and squeals of disgust. This
whole perfect night, when everything is
pretty much intact, is where I some-
times want the story to stop.
I had no idea the divorce was coming.
“Family meeting,” my mom called out,
a couple of years later. We assembled
in the afternoon in the long narrow din-
ing room, around the wooden table that
could seat twenty-four. Simon and I were
lying on the Oriental rug, and I turned my
attention to the bushel of apples my
mother kept in the coldest part of the
room. My mother shopped in bulk, like a
restaurateur: she bought four gallons of
milk at a time, and wheels of cheese. I was
gazing at those apples when she announced
to my father, “Jim, it’s over, and the kids
and I have decided you should go.”
It took more than a year to fully dis-
mantle the family, but I felt as if I had
fallen asleep by the lamb pit one night
and woken up the next morning to the
debris of a brilliant party, a bare cup-
board, and an empty house. I don’t
38 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 17, 2011
know exactly how my parents worked it
out, but I think that my dad was sup-
posed to be in charge of us the summer
after they finalized their divorce, but he
wasn’t entirely up to the job; my brother
Simon and I were left alone for weeks.
We were better off, we seemed to agree
without discussing it, each to fend for
himself, rather than become allies.
Our mother moved to a remote part
of northern Vermont. There was some-
thing about that setting that she—at that
time a rage-prone, menopausal, highly
distressed woman—found soothing. But
it held no appeal for Simon and me,
whom she took with her. After a long
winter in Vermont, we returned again to
our dad and the remnants of the house
we had grown up in.
That summer, my father played the
Janis Ian album “Between the Lines”
over and over, like a much younger man
might have done. He worked long hours,
then fell asleep in bed with the light on
and the crossword puzzle half-finished,
his felt-tipped pen leaving large black
spots where it bled into the sheets. It was
one of my dad’s worst financial periods,
the summer of Bone-less living. Banks
and creditors called every morning start-
ing at seven-thirty. My dad went to New
York and stayed there for most of the
summer, launching a show for which
he’d designed the sets. I answered the
phone and gave truthfully vague answers
concerning my dad’s whereabouts, not to
derail the creditors but because I really
didn’t know where he was or when he
was coming home.
By the time my parents might have
realized—a glance in the rearview mir-
ror—that they’d abandoned us, we were
not to be recovered. That summer was
the definitive end of some things and
the hastened beginning of many others.
I smoked cigarette butts salvaged from
public ashtrays and sidewalks. I wore
spike heels that I shoplifted and a
watermelon-red tube top. I did my first
line of coke. Over the next couple of
years, I made friends in town who had
nobody watching them, either, but they
were twenty and not thirteen. I giddily
flipped through the racks of adult be-
havior and tried on whatever seemed at-
tractive. It was a spectacularly scatter-
shot approach, in which I found myself
going to Little League practice in the
afternoons while reading D. H. Law-
rence’s “Women in Love” at night, be-
cause it had a photograph of naked peo-
ple in bed on the back cover.
There must have been adults who
would have liked to put a strong hand on
the back of my neck and walk me gently
off the field for a quiet pep talk. But I was
meeting only the kind who were enter-
tained by the way I said “cunt,” “fuck,”
“dick,” and “shit,” and who gave me the
attention I was seeking. “She’s thirteen
going on twenty-five,” my dad used to
say proudly when introducing me to
strangers.
I n the morning, we awoke and found
in the pit a huge bed of glowing coals,
perfect for roasting lamb. My dad threw
coils of sweet Italian sausage onto the
grill. He split open loaves of bread to
toast over the coals, and, for breakfast,
instead of Cocoa Puffs and cartoons, we
sat up in our sleeping bags, reeking of
smoke, and ate these giant, crusty,
charred sausage sandwiches. Afterward,
we rolled up our pants and walked bare-
foot into the frigid stream, built a little
corral with river rocks, and stocked it
with jugs of Chablis and cases of
Heineken, cream soda, and root beer.
Getting beer out of the stream, instead
of just reaching into an ice-packed,
bright-red cooler, was Bone-a fide. We
had to mow the meadow and rake it,
and the smell of fresh-cut grass was
Bone-issimo. We filled hundreds of
brown paper bags with sand and plumb-
ers candles, then set them out along the
stream’s edge and by the groundhog
holes so that nobody drunkenly fell into
the stream or broke an ankle when it got
dark. We made tables out of plywood
and sawhorses. And we juiced up the
glow-in-the-dark Frisbees in the car
headlights so we would be ready to play
at the far dark end of the meadow.
The lambs were placed over the coals
head-to-toe-to-head, the way you’d put
a bunch of kids having a sleepover into
bed. A heavy metal garden rake was kept
next to the pit to move the spent coals to
the edges as the day passed and the ashes
built up, revealing the glowing red em-
bers beneath. The lambs roasted slowly,
their blood dripping onto the coals with
a hypnotic hiss. My dad basted them by
dipping a thick branch covered with a big
swab of cheesecloth into a paint can filled
with olive oil, crushed rosemary, garlic,
and chunks of lemons. He mopped the
lambs with soft careful strokes, as you
might paint a new sailboat. All day, as we
did our chores, the smells of gamy lamb,
applewood smoke, and rosemary-garlic
marinade commingled.
The rest of the meal was prepared in
such quantities that the kitchen felt hec-
tic. There were giant bowls of lima-
bean-and-mushroom salad, with red
onion and oregano, and full sheet pans
of shortcake. Melissa snipped cases of
red and black globe grapes into perfect
clusters with a pair of office scissors
while my mom mimosaed eggs—forc-
ing hard-cooked whites and then hard-
cooked yolks through a fine sieve—onto
pyramids of cold steamed asparagus vin-
aigrette. Melissa and my mother worked
quickly and cleanly, both in bib aprons
with a dish towel neatly folded and
tucked into the apron string, “doing the
bones” of our lamb roast.
Todd gave the lambs a quarter turn
every half hour. Simon parked the cars.
Jeffrey politely kissed the older guests,
who arrived first, on both cheeks. I
plunged in and out of the stream to re-
trieve drinks.
Then they started arriving, all the
long-haired, bell-bottomed artist friends
of my dad’s and former ballet-dancer
friends of my mother’s, with long necks
and erect posture, and our friends, too—
the whole pack of them. We were muddy,
grass-stained, and soaking wet after
fifteen minutes. I barely recognized the
washed and neatly groomed Marescas
without their butcher coats.
The meadow filled with people and
fireflies and laughter—just as my father
had imagined—and the lambs on their
spits were hoisted onto the men’s shoul-
ders, as if in a funeral procession, and set
down on the makeshift tables to be
carved. Then the sun started to set and
we lit the paper-bag luminarias, and the
lambs were crisp-skinned and sticky,
and the root beer was frigid, and it
caught, like an emotion, in the back of
my throat. 
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 17, 2011 39