“That’s the type of customers we’ve had,” Madanian says, still fighting back emotion. “We know them so well. When we leave, it’s going to be devastating to the community.”
It is not surprising, considering that she has at times put in 80 hour weeks, that Madanian’s clients have sometimes become her best friends as well. She admits the end of Billings & Stover frightens her a good deal.
“It’s going to be so hard,” she says. “Ninety percent of my friends come from here. I don’t know how they’ll reach me now that I’m gone. Everyone calls me here.”
Madanian says she does not know what she will be doing next, but assures customers that her hand-made fudge will still be available.
“I wish you hadn’t told me that,” jokes an elderly woman buying a piece.
Cardullo’s, a family-owned food shop in the Square, will be selling her fudge from now on.
“As each small business goes out of business,” Madanian says, “the ones that stay get closer and closer. The friendships go beyond competition.”
Around lunch hour, the store fills with customers coming for their daily fudge fix. In the back kitchen, Madanian is hard at work on a Valentine’s Day treat: heart-shaped brownies with chocolate fudge frosting. Landers and two other store employees pass by, nibbling on the scraps.
Madanian dabs a bit of fudge on a cardboard base and places a white doily on top. She glues on a thick brownie with another dab, smears it generously with chocolate fudge, and pastes another brownie on top. It’s like a sandwich.
“Just winging it,” she says, “like I do with all my baking.”
Her best-seller at the bakery counter, Madanian says, has been a traditional Armenian pastry she learned to make from her mother, a sweet bread called choreg.
This kind of homemade touch is part of the Billings & Stover formula—part nostalgia, part bizarre. At the cosmetics counter, for example, Madanian maintains a supply of old-school perfumes.
“Everyone always says our perfumes remind them of their grandmothers,” Madanian says. “It’s true. We’re the only people who still carry those scents.”
But the store has always mixed the traditional with the out-of-the-way. In 1854, when it started out at the present-day location of Au Bon Pain, its circular advertised “foreign leeches of recent importation always on hand.”
At 7 o’clock sharp, the doors close. Madanian stays to chat with a friend and later that night, her sisters come up to help her pack up some of the store’s things. The store has been in the family for most of their lives.
At one time Madanian had hoped to keep Billings & Stover in the family for another generation. In fact, last summer her 12-year-old nephew put in time at the store as an apprentice.
“I had him working his way from the bottom up, like my dad made me,” she says.
But this winter she told him the days of Billings & Stover would have to end.
“He was so broken up,” she says.
—Staff writer Eugenia B. Schraa can be reached at schraa@fas.harvard.edu.