Algren at Sea (6 page)

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”—

Soufflé Grand Marnier
would be the
surprise-du-
fry-cook, Fatty announced. And taking up a deflated balloon, he began stretching it in a fashion that might not have been suggestive had he not shut his eyes and the balloon not been as pink as skin. With his mouth open and his tongue deriving pleasure from the touch of his own lips, the effect sustained was definitely one of minor rapture. I simply couldn't see why it should be necessary to put all
that
into so simple a task as balloon-stretching.

“I take it you've been at sea a long time, sir,” I suggested in a friendly tone, implying that nobody could have achieved such sureness of touch in handling balloons who had stayed on dry land.

Fatty blew the balloon up, tied it, and volleyed it toward me in a taunt as contemptuous as it was gentle. I fought down an impulse to push half a banana into his puss and say, “Call
this
tangy.” As it was, I had no choice but to volley the object just as gently back. But if I didn't get the hell out of there before that soufflé arrived, I realized, they would find me hiding in the hold writing “Catch me before I kill more” on the underside of a turbine. All I wanted was to be alone with the smoldering remains of my Smith-Corona.

I fumbled with the belt that held me to my chair. The waiters were clearing the tables of dishes bearing the remains of haddock, eel, salmon, whale, sole, clam, whitefish, oysters, octopus, herring, crabs, and swordfish and here it was only the middle of the week. Would there be enough left out there to go around come Friday? Well, no news is good news.

I was still trying to unstrap myself when the ship hit a long swell; the duke's chair with the duke in it started sliding downgrade away from the duchess—yet how proudly the old man held his little dish of creamed spinach high as he went! Like a man who knows too well how much spinach is left in his life and being careful not to lose a drop. Two waiters rushed to retrieve him, though it struck me that they might just as well have walked. Then, as they almost had him, the back-swell took chair—duke, spinach and all, sliding him right back to where he belonged. The duchess didn't look up.

She didn't know he'd been gone.

But the duke held his little dish high to show everyone he hadn't spilled any. There was a polite scattering of applause. Meyer Davis's aides burst into an encore of
Bluebird of Hoppiness.
I got free at last.

“Won't you wait for the
surprise-du-chef,
sir?” Goldbraid Fatty inquired politely as I stood up and the others eyed me strangely, “—it's
tan
-gy.” Closing his eyes, he let his mouth hang in order to run his tongue across his lips.

“I'm going up on deck to look for Moby-Dick, sir,” I explained. “The moment I see white water I'll let you know.”

 

That night I dreamed that every passenger aboard, first class, second class, tourist, and cabin, all sat at some gala dinner at the same long board. I saw Goldbraid Fatty rise at the head, strangely promoted to Captain.

He did not speak, but chewed some pink sort of gum instead, with a fork gripped firmly in his right hand. Chewed slowly, with a theatrical effort, exactly as though the point of the occasion, the reason for this assembly of right-thinking persons, was to study the procedure of a ship's captain in the chewing of pink gum.

Then I sensed, with a slow apprehension, that there was more to it than this. For a meaningful bubble began to form on our Captain's lips, that grew into a pink-skinned balloon. With a snap of his tongue like a command to all hands, the officer took his lips from the balloon and blew lightly to launch it. It floated straight up, as in Zero-G gravity, and I think that at that moment we all felt a little weightless too. For every eye followed, as every eye knew, that whether the ship were to continue on course or to plummet to the bottom taking down all hands, depended upon our Captain's next move.

And with one firm stroke he plunged the fork into the balloon.

It did not burst. It gently deflated yet did not fall. It held itself above us by a special chemistry, turning itself slowly into a barely visible dust. Never growing smaller yet ceaselessy spilling: a barely visible green-gray dust. Over flowers long faded, over favors age had dried, over fruit decayed to a scatter of seed and faces gone eyeless in their dry skulls; that since time out of mind had been those of our Captain, the Rear-Echelon Radical: Mrs. Di Santos: The Connecticut Child.

And downward and down through deeps ever darker, sun-green to death-green to ultimate black, in the shroud of the waters I felt the hull seeking its sea-bottom home. I felt the hull touch, that gradual impact: then the slow cutting sand-spraying slide through coral and anemone, along the sea-drifted sands.

And lost in vast oceanic ages where, wandered by waters where no fish swim, the voice of the duchess came to me grieving:

“What are your plans
now,
Daddy-O?”

Flying the Irish Sea by Aer Lingus on a secret mission for the Irish Republican Army is serious business, especially so when the I.R.A. hasn't been let in on the plan. Although my papers, consisting of a signed photograph of Victor McLaglen and a character recommendation from ex-Mayor O'Dwyer, were cleverly concealed in the spare battery of an electrified jazzbow tie purchased on Forty-Sixth Street, I remained outwardly calm despite the altitude.