Algren at Sea Read online

  I was watching vigilantly for a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty out of the wrong side of the ship when a deck steward entered. I told him that the object in the brown metal box was a typewriter so he wouldn’t try to feed it, and he urged me to go up on the sports’ deck.

  This was good news. “I didn’t know you had one.” I thanked him, and went up to look around for a couple of sports. A young man and young woman were leaning on the rail with their arms about each other, plainly waiting for the gaming to begin. I leaned beside them. If they wanted action they’d have to speak first. Neither one spoke. I finally had to.

  “You look like a couple of bad losers,” I told them, and left them for a part of the deck where losers aren’t allowed.

  I took a turn of looking at the Atlantic. I remembered when I had crossed it along with some four thousand other Americans, on The Dominion Monarch, in convoy. It had taken us seventeen days to make Liverpool. And seventeen years had passed since that day.

  Memories made in the seasons of war are the most enduring.

  I remembered the time, as though it had been but a week before, in Camp Twenty Grand, that MP’s had pinched a chaplain for auctioning off an ambulance. And not even the chaplain could account for the Indian GI in the back, so drunk he could not tell the name of his own outfit. The chaplain hadn’t known that, in auctioning off the ambulance, he had auctioned off an Indian.

  Or trying to find my way back to the motor convoy, late at night, a snoot so full of chianti, and no pass, that I got lost out of bounds in Marseilles. I heard sea-bells under the Egyptian streets and sea-bells rang the walls.

  The street I got lost on was the Rue Phocéen. The street of the Phoenicians. Its narrow heights were lit that night by a lion-colored moon. I stopped for a moment to lean against a wall. And felt a baby’s fingers entwine themselves about my little finger.

  Looking down I saw an Algerian child, no more than eleven or twelve. She looked up at me with darkly solemn eyes. “Come,” she told me. “Come.” As though “come” were the single word of English she knew.

  She led me down the Rue Phocéen to a door the moonlight lay across, whose knob was no higher than her head. She went in before me, and I did not follow. At the foot of a staircase I could see only dimly, she turned and stood with her back to an unshaded bulb.

  She did not ask me again, but merely waited. I shook my head, “No.” And went on down the Rue Phocéen, with a great length of time seeming to have elapsed since she had taken my hand. And the moon burned darker now.

  When I looked back, the door she had entered was still standing open.

  Or the time that, feeling well fed, well groomed, and well endowed, the epitome of the successful private, one who had come through the war (for the war was then done) without being court-martialed, and wearing a wallet on either hip. I was on my self-contented way, at 1800 hours, to see Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not. I stopped, in the after-chow light, to pick up the dice at an acey-deucy table. And returned to my tent at 2400 hours with both wallets emptied, feeling ill fed, badly groomed, and sadly endowed. And never have gotten to see To Have and Have Not yet.

  Or the time the Tennessee private on the cot next to my own got the letter from his wife saying, “Honey, Don’t Come Home.” Upon which he said simply, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder for somebody else,” and tore the letter in two.

  I went down to U-68 to ask the steward how much he’d gotten for my clothes.

  Apparently he hadn’t had a decent bid, because all he’d done was hang up my topcoat, a new experience for the coat. If I had a needle and thread I’d sew you up myself, you sonofabitch, I told it, so at least you’d hang straight; you’re trying to make people think I’m a bum. I went to the mirror and, sure enough, I’d made it.

  It wasn’t because I needed a shave so much that I made my next move, but from curiosity about the rapport of my electric razor and the bathroom current. It worked fine. I cleared the dresser, took the typer out of its kennel, and plugged it in. At the first jump of smoke I thought, Women and children first, but after I got the plug loose it kept jumping smoke at me, and if that wasn’t lead I smelled burning I can whip Chico Vejar. A lucky thing I didn’t bring a dish dryer, I thought; half the crew would have been washed overboard.

  “Your dirty current blew up my nice typewriter,” I accused the steward, who had, it was plain, anticipated that event.

  “Lots of people do that lately,” he assured me contentedly.

  It just wasn’t a friendly ship; that was all there was to it.

  Should evening ever bring you the need of an apple at sea, either go to bed or keep your fat mouth shut. All I did was to make some casual inquiry about where I might buy one, and went for a short stroll. To find, on returning, a basket heaped with apples, three hues of grapes, pears, bananas, oranges, kumquats, and litchi nuts. My first thought was that I must have an admirer aboard, probably the captain.

  Now, if I could smuggle this heap down to tourist class, I thought, I might make the price of my ticket back in the greatest seagoing financial coup on record. Finally, I felt I was being treated better than I, or anyone else, deserved. A feeling from which I recovered by eating my way through the heap down to the wood. It didn’t occur to me that this could happen twice in my life. Actually, it happened thereafter every time I left U-68. I couldn’t take a ten-minute stroll without returning to find a basket of flora transported from the gardens of four continents to rot in my stateroom. Either I was being secretly watched or the stuff was growing out of the wall.

  Once, however, I became accustomed to the admiration implicit in the presentation of these baskets, it was a back-hand slap when one basket showed up definitely short one kumquat. Let the chef collar the clown who perpetrated this cruel mockery or come in and be flogged himself, was my thinking. Yes, and be damned to the cowardly rabble traveling second and third class over my strictly first-class sea.

  Had I only been able to sustain this high-wheeling mood I might have qualified as a literary critic for Partisan Review or a mutuel clerk at a fifty-dollar window. I might even have been able to hold both jobs. Presentable people are needed in both these lines. But the mood was melted by the strains, faint yet clear, of Meyer Davis’s orchestra swinging Drink, Drink, Drink to Old Heidelberg—it was teatime in the cocktail bar and teatime in the lounge! Teatime in the powder room and in the hearts of men! Who can hold bitterness in his heart when music like that comes along?

  Oh, good for you, Kindly Meyer Davis and your kindly orchestra, I thought, and hurried to the lounge.

  I loved that lounge because it was there that the most right-thinking people aboard were to be found, drinking tea as the evening sun went down. I didn’t even mind when that evening sun sank. Because then the lights came up and I could see them all better. In fact, I was so moved by the consciousness of being among these great-souled men and women that, when the music stopped, I planted myself directly beneath the orchestra.

  “As for Meyer Davis’s orchestra,” I announced, “I say hurrah!”

  The ladies joined me in three rousing cheers for Meyer Davis, and I retired, confident that Mr. Davis was pleased to have found so frank an admirer aboard his ship.

  Everyone wanted to know, in a sort of teatime huff, What is she so quiet about? Why don’t she say something? Why they figured the poor broad should make more noise than anyone else because she was a duchess I couldn’t quite catch.

  But there she’d be, evening after evening, waiting for the duke to finish his creamed spinach so she could get started on her sirloin. The duke had had his quota of sirloins by the time she was born and must have been over the hill before. Now only God and creamed spinach were keeping him pasted together.

  But for some reason he didn’t want to actually fall apart till he was eighty-two. If he had more than three days to go his reasoning was faulty.

  Nobody held the duke’s extreme age against him but myself. It was the little broad that had the nerve to s
it there as if she wasn’t yet thirty, when everyone knew she was every day of thirty-four, that made the ladies so salty. Myself, I didn’t dare to say she hardly looked twenty-six.

  In fact, I approved of the match from her standpoint, which seemed to be the only tenable one. What was the difference who spooned spinach to the duke the last week before he was buried? was how I felt. Either he had had it or he hadn’t; and if he hadn’t, not even Meyer Davis could help him. If I pulled a chair up beside hers to ask, “Baby, exactly what are your plans?” it would show her whose side I was on. But I never got around to it, being too diverted by the carryings-on of my own table.

  At the head of it, in full command, was a seagoing Fatty Arbuckle, a ship’s officer who looked like he lived on gold braid and some of the threads had caught on his sleeves. Since he was at the head and I was at the foot, there was no chance of pasting him one without knocking over the flowers. He took an immediate liking to me too.

  “Try the gin-ger, it’s tan-gy.” Fatty would recommend a dish of sweets to Mrs. Di Santos, and then leave his mouth hanging, tongue thrust into his cheek. I got a better grip on my fork in case he tried to close in. I thought he was after my salad. When you’re a victim of overprivilege you have to be ready for anything.

  (The way you know you are traveling first class, really first class, is by the way the olive looks up at you when the glass is gone dry, with its own special appeal, saying, “Please eat me.” Another way you know is by the way the waves back off bowing. Across a strictly first-class sea. It may look a bit rough and wild for the brutes two decks below, and if it isn’t, the crew is entitled to knock them about a bit. Otherwise, what am I paying for?)

  Mrs. Di Santos, a dazzling blonde from the headwaters of the Amazon, sat at the officer’s right. She never showed up till evening, and by that hour was so zonked she had to be strapped into her chair. Everyone, for that matter, had to be strapped, with a view to prevention of personal-injury suits should the tub take a sudden dip, but Mrs. Di Santos would have had to be strapped in a bowling alley.

  By the time she came to dinner she had just sense enough left to put stuff in her mouth—if it ran down the inside of her neck, she swallowed it. If it didn’t run she chewed it. She was a healthy young sot who liked the stuff that ran down the inside of her neck better than the stuff she was forced to chew. I think she had real class when sober but I never saw her asleep.

  On Fatty’s other side sat The Connecticut Child, a twenty-year-old of six foot one and a half, poor child, for I took her walking around the deck and she wasn’t wearing high heels. My private guess was that someone had sent her in hope she might gain spirit and elegance. God knows she needed a touch of both. But I couldn’t see how she was going to pick up either by sitting at our table. There was nobody there to pick up from. All she could learn was how to pass ginger that wasn’t that tangy.

  Beside The Connecticut Child sat the Rear-Echelon Liberal, one of the best kinds that there are. A real boy-barrister, a Fearless Philip of that vigilant breed who are forever breathing down the necks of others to see that others are as fair-minded as themselves. They have to keep you from joining the dark forces gathering against Mankind.

  These dark forces are forever trying to put Shylock on TV or Fagin in a movie, while the forces of light realize that Fagin was a cockney all along. After all, the cockneys never suffered a pogrom like us—poor us—and to tell the truth neither did we. But we had relatives in Warsaw (a city we never saw) and are thus entitled to practice cold-caulking shysterism with immunity. Behind the legal barriers of the law and the moral barriers of liberalism.

  This was the line Fearless Philip got on right off, conveniently dividing humanity into forces of darkness and light with no doubt whatsoever about what side he was on. Actually, he didn’t give a hang for “The Human Condition,” as he was fond of putting it, his only real concern being the condition of certain loans he had made at 12 per cent out of bank funds borrowed at 4. But this type of operation requires a moral tone with which to protect itself, and that’s the tone of your Fair-Minded Liberal. (First Class, I ought to have told you before, was. purely loaded with fair-minded persons, all of whom had paid their first-class passage out of the proceeds of usury, blackmail, fraud, double-loyalties, decorous finkery, and the whole pervasive entanglement of Rapietta-Greenspongism.) I was elated to discover that I couldn’t have found a better table at which to observe the judicial mind at first hand.

  This was demonstrated by Fearless Philip himself, making a decision on whether he wanted filet avec champignon medium, on the rare side, rare on the medium side, or just five-eighths between rarefied-medium and mediumed-rare. As every cut had a toothpick stuck through its hide I couldn’t see how the difference was that crucial.

  What made him really appealing to everyone, however, was that he didn’t mind keeping the rest of the table waiting at his chamber doors while he took the waiter into consultation. With one judicial finger on the menu designating the ultimate steak of his ultimate choice, the waiter leaning forward attentively, pencil in hand, the Rear-Echelon Liberal would frown in thought while the tension around him mounted and spread; till even the duchess, at the next table, would feel it and crane her head about to see what was affecting her neck. When he had everyone’s attention, he would hand his verdict down: “Meeeee-deeeee-yummm ray-err.”

  It was done. Tension relaxed, conversation picked up. He was the real thing in front-line finks as well as in rear-rank radicals. I still wonder how he got his start.

  Then it would be my turn, and since The Connecticut Child seemed to expect something from me, I’d sneak a bit of spit on the ball myself. I’d hold the menu close to my eyes, one eye nearly shut, and ask, “What is poissonnière?” Immediately everyone would shout in chorus, “Fish!” Especially Mrs. Di Santos.

  “Yeah,” I’d answer shrewdly, “but which one?”

  That menu was an honor roll of the Vasty Deep. Everything that disports itself in the trough of the waters or hangs upsy-downsy by eyeless suckers to the roof of the deepest sea-sunk cave, that scuttles sidewise across the sands, leaps in a spout of welcome to swimmers off Cape Cod, or comes smiling down the Gulf Stream on its hunkers with no thought of tomorrow was on that carte.

  “Nothing much in the line of seafood tonight,” I’d mutter, making it plain that the one chance a gourmet like myself had to have an edible supper was to go out and harpoon something himself.

  “Do try the gin-ger,” Goldbraid Fatty coaxed The Connecticut Child; “it’s tan-gy.”

  “What do I say now?” she asked me in a lowered voice.

  “Ask him if he’d like to jump ship with you,” I suggested just loudly enough to be overheard at the head of the table.

  Pale fruit, blue flowers, and sequined hats loaded the table where we sat, the night that the Gala Captain’s Dinner arrived at last. Meyer Davis’s aides stood ready on the festooned balcony above us. Goldbraid Fatty had fitted the most comical hat of all onto his head—and even at that the fun had barely begun! I hadn’t seen a table so loaded with goodies since the last time I’d played Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

  This was it. We were traveling first class at last. We were almost too gay to bear.

  The musicians struck up a chirpified tune. “They’re playing Bluebird of Hoppiness,” Fatty explained, letting his tongue hang for the usual effect. Then, without re moving his comical hat or putting his tongue back where it belonged, he began hacking at a swordfish as if it had tried to attack him. Mrs. Di Santos began dipping shark’s fin with sherry down her neck in a way that made me glad they’d taken the trouble to pour it into a soup bowl first. They might have handed her a fin and a bottle. If this one ever sobered up sharks wouldn’t be in it with her.

  The Rear-Minded Radical conducted preliminary inquiries on the red-snapper situation. Had I been the waiter I would have made some inquiries about him to a red snapper.

  Between the red snapper and the lobster, he trapped himself. He had
committed himself verbally to red snapper in an announcement made to the entire table the day before, and now he wanted a change of venue—if the lobster were fresh and not frozen—but the waiter could not swear, beyond a reasonable doubt, whether the brute were frozen or fresh. He therefore arranged for lobster upon the contingency that it was fresh and that contingency was contingent upon how fresh, and just as I decided to solve everything with one straight shot to the jaw, Fatty dispatched the waiter to the research department to discover the hour at which the lobster’s heart had ceased to beat.

  This production so intimidated The Connecticut Child that she was afraid to order anything at all lest she be committing a misdemeanor. I told her she would impress everyone by ordering jellied eel, my thinking being that the kitchen might be working with a blacksnake who’d leap out of the jelly and sink its fangs into Goldbraid Fatty so deep we could tie a ribbon onto its tail.

  THE PLAN appealed to The Connecticut Child.

  “How do I ask for one?” she wanted to know.

  “Go to the rail and holler—maybe one will give himself up,” I suggested. The waiter returned with good news for everyone—a lobster was just putting in his death throes under the auspices of the chef, after having gotten the latter’s promise that he wouldn’t be served to any but a first-class passenger. In that event, our right-wing progressive decided, he’d take lobster instead of red snapper. He’d had a choice, but what choice had the lobster had between being scalded or frozen to death? If you can live on contingency at sea you’ve got it made, men. That’s what it’s like when you’re traveling first class.

  Now it turned out that Goldbraid Fatty had fixed things with the kitchen for a surprise-du-chef. So long as I could defend myself, I resolved quietly, I wasn’t going to be taken by surprise by a seagoing fry-cook. “If you can keep your head when all about you,” I recalled, “are losing theirs and blaming it on you”—