My Ears Are Bent (23 page)

Mr. Glancy said the oystermen kept a close watch on their beds, but that they were bothered often by poachers.

“There are millions of dollars worth of oysters lying out there on the bottom of the bay,” he said, “and stealing is inevitable. On foggy nights the thieves run out there and play havoc. Sometimes they have a little motorboat and take the oysters with tongs, and sometimes they have dredges on their boats.

“There is no way to eradicate them. About the only man who was able to keep them off his beds was Stanley Lowndes, the millionaire oysterman, who weighed 400 pounds. He’s dead now.

“He was having a lot of trouble with stealing in the fattening grounds on Staten Island, which used to be perfect for oysters. One day he went out to his beds and caught a boat red-handed. The thieves were loading them on as if they owned the place. Mr. Lowndes was very angry.

“He pulled up alongside the thief’s boat and tied up to it. ‘You want oysters, do you?’ he yelled at the thief. Well, he had a mountain of oysters on his own boat and he put his men to work dumping them on the thief’s boat. Pretty soon it sank to the bottom of
the bay. The thief and his men had to swim ashore. Mr. Lowndes followed them in with his boat and now and then he’d yell, ‘I’m keeping your boat for evidence.’ He didn’t have much more trouble with pirates.”

The hale, thrifty Long Islanders with Dutch names and capacious stomachs who plant and harvest the oyster crops combine the techniques of the seaman, the biologist and the farmer. Captain Jacobus Kwaak is a representative oysterman, who smokes one of the strongest black briar pipes in the Western hemisphere and stamps about the deck of his oyster boat in all weather with the vigor of a man of forty, although he is approaching seventy-five, a condition he explains by his habit of eating anywhere from a dozen to a bushel of oysters a day for sixty-five years.

The Captain came from Zeeland, the Netherlands, when he was three. After attending a school on Long Island for nine months he decided he was an educated man and got a job in the oyster sheds. He has worked with oysters ever since, becoming an authority on their habits, habits which have puzzled generations of biologists. At intervals he has reared ten children. He has also become one of the most
respected citizens in his hometown, West Sayville, and one of the best amateur weather prophets in America, basing his predictions on the way the oysters feed and the manner in which they bed. He consumes with gusto a large portion of each oyster crop harvested on the Atlantic seaboard, and when he goes to a restaurant and sees people ordering fruit cups and tomato juice instead of oysters, the sight bewilders him, causes him to believe that someone forgot to lock the doors of the asylums.

“In the summer months, the months without an R in their names, the oysters spawn. That is the reason we don’t encourage the eating of oysters during those months. They won’t hurt you, but just before they spawn they have a flat taste and just after they are thin and stringy. I can’t look at an oyster and tell if it’s a male or a female. Most oysters start as males and some change to females in later years. We can be sure, though, that the ratio of sexes in a spawning bed is about 50–50.

“When the water gets warm enough the female oyster throws out from ten to sixty million microscopic eggs, and the male throws out sperm. They float together in the water and form larvae, which float or lie on the bottom for two weeks. Then they attach themselves to the ‘clutch,’ the old oyster shells we threw overboard. In a few months we can pull
them up and figure out just about what our crop will be five years from then. It takes them five years to develop.

“A bunch of little oysters will stick to one old shell, and we have to knock them off and spread them out, giving them room to grow, just like a farmer with a crop of corn. Also, the time a farmer spends weeding his corn we have to spend weeding out the starfish and the drills, the two oyster parasites.”

Captain Kwaak and other oyster captains spend a period of each year eradicating the starfish. This animal wraps itself affectionately around an oyster and pries open its shell. Then it deposits its own stomach in the oyster’s shell, covers the oyster with gastric juices, eats it and then recovers its freewheeling stomach.

Once an official of the Bluepoints Company, the largest oyster company in the world, for which Captain Kwaak works as commander of the flagship, Willie K., heard an oyster shucker ask the Captain what was the most oysters he ever ate at one sitting.

“One night me and a friend sat down and ate a barrel of half-shells,” said the Captain. (There are approximately 1,000 half-shells in a barrel.)

“Well, Captain, I guess you didn’t eat much supper that night, did you?” asked the oyster shucker.

“Hell,” said the Captain, “that was right after supper.”

According to his mood, the Captain thinks of himself as a farmer or as a biologist.

“We farm under water,” he said, “and we have to prepare our ground just like a truck-farmer. To get the bottoms out in the bay ready for planting we drop tons of old oyster shells overboard. We throw at least 500 bushels of old shells to each acre of bottom. We call the shells ‘clutch.’ The little oysters attach themselves to the old shells.”

The oystermen mop the bottoms of their beds with long cotton mops in their struggle against the starfish. The parasite gets tangled in the mop and is brought to the deck. There it is quickly doused with boiling water. It is an expensive process, and if you think oysters should be cheaper you should hate the starfish.

Spread out on the bottom of Great South Bay, which has an average depth of nine feet, the oysters strain gallons of salt water through their gills and eat microscopic vegetables and animals, gorging on the larvae of snails and clams. A cannibal, the oyster also eats its own larvae. Most oystermen boast with justice that oysters are one of the most healthful foods in the world. The biologists employed by the industry have found that oysters are high in protein, rich in iodine and mineral salts, especially so with respect to iron, copper and manganese. If you are bothered by such matters, it may please you to know that the oyster
possesses “well-balanced nutritional potencies of Vitamins A, B, C and D.” It also bears Vitamin G, which fights against pellagra.

Most oystermen eat oysters raw with no sauce. The only workers in the industry who lack tremendous enthusiasm for oysters as food are the shuckers, the men who stand at bins all day and open oysters for shipment in cans. Few of them will eat more than a dozen a day.

The shuckers are skilled workmen. A beginner is apt to cut both hands off attempting to open an oyster. There are two methods of shucking. One is the cracking method, in which the worker knocks off the tip of the shell, inserts his knife and forces the shells apart. The other method, known as “side-knifing,” is simpler, but it requires thick muscles. The worker simply takes the oyster in an iron grip, inserts the knife and tears the shells apart with a twist of his wrist.

The sheds in which oysters are shucked, washed and canned are immaculate. All utensils are sterilized, and the benches at which shuckers work are hosed over each night with live steam. The shuckers are paid on a piecework basis. The present rate is 25 cents a gallon. The highest any man made last year was $11 for a day’s work in which he shucked 44 gallons, or 8,800 oysters.

Captain Kwaak believes oysters should be eaten right out of their shells. “A sauce is not worth the bother,” he said. “Some dry cracker tastes good with an oyster sometimes, but horseradishes and such stuff is no good. The best way to eat oysters, of course, is out at the beds. I have to restrain myself when I am hauling them in. When we are dredging, the pile on the deck grows until it is level with my wheelhouse. When it gets that high, I reach out and start eating.

“I have made it a practice to eat oysters or clams every day of my life, and now they are almost as necessary as water. This summer I drove out to Denver to see one of my seven daughters, and I wanted some clams. I went into a Denver restaurant and they had six cherrystones on the menu for one buck. I told the waiter I’d starve to death before I’d pay that much for a half-dozen clams.”

East Coast oystermen are contemptuous of Pacific oysters, finding them bitter and unpalatable and often from Japanese seed. They respect the famous Colchester oysters of England and the green Marennes oysters of France, and they are proud that Europeans have developed such a taste for oysters from the eastern coast of the United States that thousands of barrels are shipped abroad each year. However, many Great South Bay oystermen believe that by far the best oyster in the world is a well-nourished
fat Bluepoint or Cape Cod from Mattituck Creek in Great Poconic Bay.

“You can search all the waters in the world,” said Captain Kwaak, selecting a Bluepoint from the heap level with his wheelhouse window, “and you won’t find better seafood than oysters from Long Island Sound.”

“I don’t think anything could be so much fun as to get a good hold on a pompous person and shake him or her until you can hear the false teeth rattling,” said Peter Arno, who has made the pompous, big-bosomed mama a symbol of a withering social order.

It was late in the afternoon and the well-tailored cartoonist had just turned up at his disheveled studio, an entire floor at 15 East Fifty-sixth Street. While he talked, he chewed hungrily on a Virginia ham sandwich and drank from a paper container of coffee, his breakfast.

The floor around his drawing board was covered with charcoal sketches made late at night and tossed aside for revision—sketches made with the utmost care, but looking as if they were scratched off in a moment or two.

Stacked in a corner of the big room were three wooden cases stamped “Berry Bros., & Co., Wine
Merchants.” “I have ten more cases in Nassau. Swell old rye. Picked it up at thirty-five a case because they didn’t know how good it was themselves. Already they’re trying to buy it back at eighty a case. No sale.”

Talking, the cartoonist jumped nervously from subject to subject. There was a telephone at his elbow, and it went off every few minutes. He would jump to his feet to answer it, stamping his shoes against the floor in a tentative tapdance as he talked.

“At no time in the history of the world,” he said, sloshing his coffee about in the pasteboard container, “have there been so many damned morons together in one place as here in New York right now. Any night in the big night clubs. The town squirms with them. Vain little girls with more alcohol in their brains than sense. Take a look in any night club, or the fancy restaurants around lunchtime.

“The kind of person with money who sits and says to himself, ‘I’m hot stuff; I’m just about the hottest stuff around.’ Pompous. The fat old guy snorting around town as if he owned the earth and all that’s on it. The wheezy old dowager sitting up in her opera box with a frown on her fat face …”

The telephone rang again, urgently. A friend called to give him advice about a traffic violation involving an appearance in court.

It appears that Mr. Arno is still fond of extracting speed from gasoline and has not changed in this
respect from the days when he complained to the Packard Motor Car Company that his automobile was not capable of 100 miles per hour. Now he drives a Duesenberg, a slick job. He had a lot of fun at the Vanderbilt Cup Race at Westbury; among his friends are some of the best speed drivers in the country.

“Yes,” he said, tossing the telephone into its trough, “those people make me mad, the young ones more than the old ones. You don’t do good work of this sort unless you’re mad at something. I’m sure that’s true. For several years I wasn’t mad at anything. I went to Hollywood and fooled around. My work suffered. My work wasn’t worth a damn.

“I’ve always rebelled against the social order, if you get what I mean. At least, against some aspects of it. As I grew up, it became dissatisfaction with the life around me. I would see fatuous, ridiculous people in public places, in night clubs where I ran a band, on trains and beaches, in cafés, at parties, and I was awfully annoyed by them, by the things they did and said. I had a really hot impulse to go and exaggerate their ridiculous aspects. That anger, if you like, gave my stuff punch and made it live. I mean, I don’t know anything better to call it than anger.”

“Why were you angry?” he was asked. “You have always been as well-fed as the people you caricature. You led a successful jazz band. One of your shows
[“The New Yorkers,” in 1930, with the violent Clayton, Jackson and Durante, amiable Frances Williams, and Ann Pennington, with the classy legs] was one of the best revues ever produced in the United States. You have been a successful cartoonist from the start. So what kept you from becoming complacent and fat-faced?”

“Oh, hell, I don’t know,” said Mr. Arno, balling up the sheet of waxed paper in which his sandwich had been wrapped and tossing it into the air. “What’s gained by making generalities about yourself?”

The cartoonist was quiet for ten minutes or so, thinking the matter over. He decided that, as much as anything else, his contempt for the self-satisfied and the fatuous was generated by his interest in the Civil War period and by his respect for the drawings by Honoré Daumier, which he found in books in the library of his father, the late Supreme Court Justice Curtis A. Peters.

Arno was fascinated by Daumier, who worked on the staffs of magazines similar to The New Yorker, La Caricature, and Charivari, who was put in jail for six months for a cartoon of Louis Philippe as Gargantua, who died in 1879, a blind old man, leaving at least 3,958 lithographs for a grateful posterity.

Arno’s interest in the Civil War had its effect. Although he seldom talks about it, he is a fair student
of the war. He has a collection of biographies and histories and his hero is General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who captured 31,000 prisoners. (He is partisan, holding out for the South, although his father’s people were New Englanders and his mother was English.)