M. F. K. Fisher excerpts "The Art of Eating"

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M. F. K. Fisher excerpts "The Art of Eating"

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Excerpts from M. F. K. Fisher's "The Art of Eating".

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1:11:26 / 1:17:50

M. F. K. Fisher excerpts "The Art of Eating"

mfcwr1945

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1,008 views  Aug 1, 2021

Excerpts from M. F. K. Fisher's "The Art of Eating".

Transcript

Follow along using the transcript.

Show transcript

mfcwr1945

5 subscribers

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4 Comments

Sejin Lifeforce 生命

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@livannal.t.9068

1 month ago

love the ticking clock in background

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@Hondo0101

1 year ago

Everyone should study this book.

1

Reply

@lucysweeney8347

2 years ago

This is a magnificent piece.Thank you sincerely for the pleasure of listening and savouring. Every word is memorable.

1

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Transcript

any normal man must nourish his body by means of food put into it through the mouth this

process takes time quite apart from the lengthy preparations and the digestions that accompany it

between the ages of 20 and 50 john doe spends some 20 000 hours chewing and swallowing food more than

eight hundred days and nights of steady eating the mere contemplation of this fact is upsetting enough

therefore we should think on what laroche foco said to eat as a necessity but to eat

intelligently is an art so few of us do we sink too easily into stupid and

overfed sensuality our bodies thickening even more quickly than our minds we sharpen one sense

at the cost of losing many others but we must grow old and we must eat

it seems far from unreasonable once these facts are accepted for man to set himself the pleasant task

of educating his palette taloran said the two things are essential in life

to give good dinners and to keep on fair terms with women as the years pass and fires cool it can

become unimportant to stay always on fair terms either with women or one's fellows but a wide and sensitive appreciation of

fine flavors can still abide with us to warm our hearts

now i am going to write a book and it will be about eating and about what to eat and about people

who eat i serve it forth excerpts both short and long from the

art of eating by mfk fisher dining partners regardless of gender

social standing or the years they've lived should be chosen for their ability to eat and drink

with the right mixture of abandon and restraint they should enjoy food and look upon its preparation and its devastation as one

of the human arts they should relish the accompanying drinks whether they be ale from the bottle on a hillside

or the right bouquet of a chamber tan 1919 in a great crystal globe on finest

damask and above all friends should possess the rare gift of sitting they should be able no eager to sit for

hours three four six over a meal of soup and wine and cheese

as well as one of twenty fabulous courses then with good friends of such attributes and good

food on the board and good wine in the picture we may may well ask

when shall we live if not now i began to understand about food the

summer i was 19 and took a train trip from los angeles to chicago with my uncle evans i learned for the

first time that a menu is not something to be looked at with hasty and often completely phony nonchalance i

must have been a trial or at least a boar on that trip i was horribly self-conscious i wanted everybody to look at me and thank me the

most fascinating creature in the world and yet i died a small hideous death if i saw even one person

through a casual glance my way in the dining car which was an unusually good one rather the way the broadway limited

was to be later with an agreeable smooth dash to it i would glance hastily at the menu and

then murmur the name of something familiar like lamb chops but you know what lamb chops taste like my uncle would say

casually why not have something exciting why not order um how about eastern scallops yes he'd go on before i could

do more than gulp awkwardly we'll have scallops tonight captain and i think an avocado cocktail

with plenty of fresh lime juice and so forth my uncle was so quiet about it that he

made me feel free and happy and those dinners with him are the only things i remember about the long hot

filthy trip then when we got to chicago his son met us bernard was by far the brainiest

member of our generation in the family on mother's side and i was much in awe of him he may even

have been of me for other reasons of course but he never showed it the minute i saw his solemn young face under its big brow i forgot

all of the ease that being with my uncle had brought me and when we went to the station restaurant for dinner and my uncle asked

me what i would like to eat i mumbled stiffly oh anything anything thank you

that was an excellent restaurant a rather small room with paneled walls and comfortable chairs and old but expert

waiters it was the union station i think i went back years later and found it had a good wine list

and a good chef it was like coming full circle to find satisfaction there where i had first started to search for

it anything i said and then i looked at my uncle and saw through all my gauchere

my really painful wish to be sophisticated and polished before him and his brilliant son that he was looking back at me with a

skull cold speculative somewhat disgusted look in his brown eyes it was as if he was saying

you stupid uncouth young ninny how dare you say such a thoughtless thing when i bother to bring you to a good place to

eat when i bother to spend my time and my son's time on you when i've been so patient with you for

the last five days i don't even know how long that took but i knew that it was a very important time

in my life i looked at my menu really looked at it with all my brain for the first time

just a minute please i said very calmly i stayed quite cool like a surgeon when he begins an

operation or maybe a chess player opening a tournament finally i said to uncle evans without batting an eye

i'd like iced consummate please and then sweetbreads soak loose and watercress salad and i'll order the

rest later i remember that he sat back in his chair a little bit and i knew that he was proud of me

and very fond of me and i was too and never since then have i let myself say or even think oh anything about a

meal even if i had to eat it alone with death in the house or in my heart

1929 1930 paris was everything that i had dreamed

the late september when we first went there it should always be seen the first time with the eyes of childhood or of love i

was almost 21 but much younger than girls are now i think and i was wrapped in a passionate

mist of first marriage al and i stayed on the k voltaire that was before the trees were cut down

and in the morning i would stand on our balcony and watch him walk slowly among along by the book stalls

and wave to him if he looked up at me and then i would get into bed again the hot chocolate and the rich croissants were the most delicious

things there in bed with the same flowing past me and pigeons wheeling around the gray palace massage that i'd ever eaten

they were really the first thing i tasted since we were married tasted maybe to remember they were part of the warmth and

excitement of that hotel room with all of paris waiting but then paris was too full of people we

knew al's friends most of them on the long vac from english universities were

full of lady chatterley's lover and the addresses of quaint little restaurants where everybody spoke in very clipped

often newly acquired british accents and drank sparkling burgundy my friends most of the middle-aged women

living in paris on allowances from their american husbands because of the good exchange were expensive generous foolish souls

who needed several champagne cocktails at the ritz bar after their daily shopping and we were impr and were improving

their french by reading a page a week from ariel al and i got out as soon as we politely could

or a little sooner not downcast because we knew we would come back on the way to dijon we had lunch in the

courtyard of an old post hotel at avalon the food was not bad but not

very good when you knew what it might have been under such a famous shaft as chef as they had but that september noon

in 1929 when al and i ate in the courtyard with two kind silly women and felt ourselves getting nearer and

nearer to dijon one important thing happened we were hungry and everything tasted good but i forget now what we ate

except for a kind of souffle of potatoes it was hot light with a brown crust and probably

chives and grated parmesan cheese were somewhere in it but the great thing about it was that it was served alone in a course

all by itself i felt a secret justification swell in me a pride such as i've seldom known since

because all my life it seemed i'd been wondering rebelliously about potatoes i didn't care much for them except for

one furtive and largely unsatisfied period of yearning for mashed potatoes with cats upon them when i was about 11

i almost resented them in fact or rather the monotonous disinterest with which they were always treated

i'd felt that they could be good if they were cooked respectfully at home we had them at least once a day with meat you didn't say meat you said

meat and potatoes they were mashed baked boiled and when grandma was away fixed in a casserole with cream sauce

and cold somewhat optimistically potatoes o'brien it was shameful i always felt stupid too

to reduce a potentially important food to such a menial position and to take time every day to cook it

doggedly with perfunctory compulsion if i ever had my way i thought i would make a delicious thing of potatoes

that they would be a whole meal and never would i think of them as the last part of the word of meat and

and now here in the sunny courtyard of the first really french restaurant i'd ever been in i saw my theory proved it was a fine

moment we arrived at dijon and stayed at the cloche

mainly because it was the biggest and best known place in town we knew too little yet to appreciate its famous sellers and found the meals

fairly dull in the big grim dining room later we learned that once a year in november

it recaptured for those days all of its old glitter then it was full of gourmets from every corner of france and famous

chefs twirled saucepans in its kitchens and wine buyers drank chamber tens and cortanas and romanee-contis by the

council but for us it was not the place to be and while al was blissfully submerging

himself in the warm safe bath of university life filling out scholarly questionnaires and

choosing his own library corner for writing which he soon exchanged for a quiet table at the cafe de paris i hopped in and out

of fiaccas looking for a flat to live in i could not always tell the brothels

from the reputable houses and managed to interrupt several business transactions and even exchange a few embarrassed salutations

with unbuttoned university friends before i found the little apartment we were to live in it was in a low quarter everyone assured

us with horror the tram ran past it and it looked down on a little square that once it held the guillotine and now

under the shade of flick thick plantains housed two or three piece wires and an occasional wandering

sideshow with small shops all around indeed the quarter was so low that several dijonai

who had been friendly with us stopped seeing us all together what had been an amusing social pastime

in the fairly dull town life coming to tea with us safely surrounded as we were before by

mares and bishops and the smell of 13th century sellers became an impossibility when it meant

for them walking through streets that were obviously inhabited by nothing but artisans and laborers we

basked in our new freedom and absorbed sounds and vapors never met in a politera life our apartment was two floors above a

pastry shop of gourmet and was very clean and airy with a nice smell the smell was what made me decide

to take it after days of backing confusedly out of brothels and looking at rooms dark and noise some

and as lewdly suggestive as the old crones who showed them to me we signed several official certificates

bending over peach tarts in a row of soggy babas to reach the ink bottle the proprietor looked at our signatures and asked

married yes al said raising one eyebrow almost invisibly in a way that meant

in those days at least that in spite of his politely innocent manner his words carried a tremendous reprimand

or correction or so general social commentary yes you see we have the same name

and i have marked us as monsieur and madame well the man said it is less than nothing to me you

understand but the police they must be satisfied he looked amicably at us wiped his hands

on his sugary apron and marked out the madame and my profession as student in place of it he wrote monsieur fisher

and woman there was a big room with a shiny but an even tiled floor and two wide windows

looking down on the dusty little square the bed half in half out a little alcove did not keep everything from looking

spacious and pleasant especially when we pushed the round table into the corner and put books on the fake mantle place

under the wavy old mirror there was a kind of cupboard we got some candles for it and turned

one of our trunk tops into a wash stand and it was very matter of fact in spite of its melodramatic name

le champ noir outside our front door on the little landing was a tiny faucet

where we got water for washing and cooking it was a chore to carry it and even more of one to empty the pail from

the black chamber and the dishwater and what i washed the vegetables in but it was something so new that i

didn't mind it much at the time there was a fountain in the square of course and i certainly soon learned to

take my lettuces and such down there and let the spout run over them like the other women did in the quarter

the kitchen was astonishing to me because i'd never lived in a place like new york where people cook on stoves hidden in

their bureau drawers or so i'd heard it was perhaps five feet long perhaps three wide and i had to keep the door

open into the other room where i stood at the two burner gas plate there was a little tin oven the kind to

be set on top of a stove and a kind of box with two shelves in it for storage and we use it instead of a

table and there was the window one whole wall which opened wide and looked down into the green odorous

square and out over the twisted chimney pots to the skies of the coat door it was a wonderful window one of the

best i can ever remember and what i saw and thought and felt as i stood in it with my hands on the food

for us those months will always be a good part of me of course we celebrated the first night in the new place and dined well

and late at rubadoz so that the morning it was fun to lie in our niched bed and listen to the new noises

they made a pattern that we soon knew the workers in their hard shoes then the luckier ones with bicycles and

all the bells ringing the shop shutters being unhooked and folded back by sleepy apprentices

a great beating of pillows and mattresses so that now and then brown feathers floated past our windows

and always the clanging of the little trams going into the center of things that first morning there was something

more something we were to hear every wednesday and saturday a kind of whispering patterning rush of

women's feet all pointed one way i should have listened harder and learned

when we finally got up and went to the little cafe on the corner for our breakfast we saw that the soft rushing came from

hundreds of women all hurrying silently all dressed in black and carrying black string

bags or pushing little carts and empty baby buggies and while we were sitting there in the sun two easy-going foreigners

some of the women started coming back against the stream and i knew that they had come from the big market they all their bags and carts were heavy

now so that the hands that held and pushed them were puffed and red i saw the crooked curls of green beans

and squashes the bruised outer leaves of lettuces stiff yellow chicken legs and i saw that

the women were tired but full of a kind of piece i had no black string bag no old per

ambulator but i had a husband who enjoyed the dark necessity of eating as i did myself and i had a little stove so

i stood up it was almost noon and too late now to go to that market i planned innocently to pick up enough

food at the local stores to last until the next regular day and headed for a store i'd often passed

where pans hung in rows in the window and on the sidewalk clay casseroles and pots lay piled

the first week i tried to fetus was almost too difficult i learned a hundred things all the hard

way how to keep butter without ice how to have good salads every day when they could only be bought twice a week

and there was no place to keep them cool no place to keep them all really how to buy milk and eggs and cheeses and when

and where i learned that layal were literally the only place to get fresh vegetables and that two heads of cauliflower and a

kilo of potatoes and some and eve weighed about 40 pounds after i'd spent half an hour walking to the market

and an hour there and missed three crowded train ramps crowded trams home again i learned that you bought meat and

hard cheese and such by the kilo but that butter and grated cheese no matter how much you wanted were always

measured in grams i learned that the stall makers in the market were tough loudmouth people who love to mock you and collect a little

crowd and that they were friendly and kind too if you didn't mind their teasing i learned always to take my own supply

of old newspapers for wrapping things and my own bowls and cans for cream and milk and such

i learned with the tiredest feet of my life that feeding people in a town like dijon in 1929

meant walking endless cobbled miles from one little shop to another butter here sausage there bananas

someplace else and rice and sugar and coffee and still other places it was the longest most discouraging

most exciting and satisfying week i could remember and i look back on it now with an envy

that is no less real for being nostalgic i don't think i could or would ever do it again i'm too old

but then in the town i loved and with the man i loved it was just fine we ate well too it was the first real

day-to-day meal after meal cooking i'd ever done and was only a little less complicated than performing an

appendectomy on a life raft but after i got used to hauling water i'm putting together three courses on a

table the size of a bandana and lighting the portable oven without blowing myself clear into the living room instead of only halfway

it was fun we bought four plates and four forks instead of two so that we could entertain

several of the people we knew found it impossible to condone a new address even with the words whimsical and utterly mad

and very conveniently arranged always to meet us in restaurants when they wanted to see us the faithful ones who picked their way

through the crowded streets and up our immaculately clean tenement steps were few and they were always welcome

i wanted to invite the reganiers but even if we could have asked them to bring their own plates and forks

i did not think the little stove would be able to cook anything they would honestly or even politely call a meal and by then

i was beginning to have theories about what and how i would serve in my home i was beginning to believe timidly i

admit that no matter how much i respected my friend's gastronomic prejudices i had at least an equal right to indulge

my bill of five six eight courses just because the guests who were to eat it

have always been used to that many let them try eating two or three things i said so plentiful and so interesting and so

well cooked that they'll be satisfied and if they aren't satisfied let them stay away from our table and our leisurely comfortable friendship

at that table i talked like that and worried al a little because he'd been raised in a minister's family

and taught that the most courteous way to treat guests was to make them feel as if they were in their own homes

i to his well-controlled embarrassment was beginning to feel quite sure that one of the best things i could do for nine tenths of the people i

knew was to give them something that would make them forget home and all it stood for for a few blessed moments at least

i still believe this and have found that it makes cooking for people exciting and amusing for me and often

astonishingly stimulating for them my meals shake them from their routines not only of meat

potatoes and gravy but of thought of behavior occasionally i'm fond enough of a person to realize

that any such spiritual upset brought about by my serving an exotic or an eccentric dish would probably do more harm than good

and then i bow it is usually women past middle age who thus confound me and i have to be very fond of them

indeed they are few fortunately and in spite of my solicitude i still think sometimes i'm betraying them

and myself too perhaps it's not too late for them i think perhaps next time they come i will blast

their safe tidy little lives with a big turin of hot borscht and some garlic toast and salad

instead of the fruit cocktail fish meat vegetable salad dessert and coffee they tuck daintily away seven times a

week and expect me to provide for them also perhaps they should feel this safe sand blow away

so that their heads are uncovered for a time so that they will have to taste not only the solid honesty of my red borscht

but the new flavor of the changing world but when they come they're so polite so dazed so genteely dead already

the people who came often us to our room above the fan gourmet were nora on her free thursday afternoons away

from the convent and the american student lawrence who was like our brother they were both simple people and reassuring

for nora i would get a pitcher of milk and a pot of honey i'd put them with the pad of sweet butter on the table and a big square

block of the plain kind of dijon gingerbread that was called pave de sante there would be late grapes and pears in

a big bowl nora and i would sit by the open window listening to the street sounds and playing voc and debussey

and josephine baker on the tinney portable phonograph the food was full of enchantment to my sister after her gray meals in the

convent and she ate with slow voluptuous concentration lawrence was just as satisfactory he

came for real meals of course and always brought a bottle of red wine cheap but good

there would be candles on the table because the one light bulb in the room was far in the opposite corner by the bed

we would have a big salad always and something i had made in one of the clay casseroles i invented with gusto and after the

first days of experimenting with stoves pots in the markets i turned out some fine odorous things

our long stay with the reganiers where lawrence still lived had given us all a lust for simplicity

after madame's heady sauces as i remember the thing we all liked best with the salad and lawrence's wine

was a casserole of cauliflower and bread and fruit afterwards i made it so often that it became as

natural as sneezing to me and i was put off the track completely when i got back to america and found how

different it was the manner of doing it the flavor everything there in dijon the cauliflowers were

small and very succulent grown in that ancient soil i separated the flowerlets and dropped them in

boiling water for just a few minutes then i drained them and put them in a wide shallow casserole and covered them

with heavy cream and a thick sprinkling of freshly grated gruyere the nice rubbery kind

that didn't come from switzerland at all but from the euro it was called repay in the market and was graded while you watched

in a soft cloudy pile onto your piece of paper i put some fresh pepper over the top and

in a way i can't remember now the little tin oven heated the whole thing and melted the cheese

and browned it and as soon as that had happened we ate it the cream and the cheese had come together into a perfect sauce

and the little flowers were tender and fresh we cleaned our plates with bits of crisp breadcrust

and drank the wine and al and lawrence plan to write books about aristotle and robinson jeffers and probably

themselves and i planned a few things too and as i say once back in california

after so many of those casseroles i found i could never make one the vegetable was watery and there was

no cream thick enough or unpasteurized and fresh the cheese was dry and oily

not soft and light i had to make a sauce with flour in it i could concoct a good dish still but it

was never so innocent so simple and then where was the crisp bread where the honest wine and where were our

young uncomplicated hungers to [Applause] 1932 one night about 10 o'clock perhaps

a week after al was awarded his doctorate at the faculty we stopped on our way home from a dinner party and stood

looking at each other for a minute in the cold street then without a word we headed for the station we bought two tickets for

strasbourg on the midnight train that midnight not the one a week away when you when we had planned to go

most of our things were ready to be shipped we arranged with the station master to have them brought from our apartment in a day or two

then we ran down the back streets to our flat routed out the saw-faced cake maker who lived just below us

and arranged in five minutes all such questions of refunds taxes rental papers as he would have preferred to spend five

hours on we threw what wasn't already packed into suitcases we left the door open on our

dear little apartment without one backward glass of regret or even gratitude and when we were

finally sitting in the buffet de la guerre drinking a last coffee with the porter who had become our friend in the past

years we breathed again we were fleeing we were refugees from the far-famed

burgundian cuisine we were sneaking away from a round of dinner parties that we both felt calmly sure

would kill us before another week was over ever since al's masterly and amusing public oral defense

thesis which drew almost as big a crowd in the faculty amphitheater as had the last visit from a footloose

balkan regent we had been deluged with invitations most of them were from lawyers vicans

and even professors who in spite of the obvious cordiality of the faculty dean and the rector towards us had peered

suspiciously at us over the tops of their newspapers and waited until now to bestow the

accolade of their social recognition for almost two and a half years they had watched us and observed to their cynical

amazement that we were breaking every precedent established by former american students

we stayed we didn't get drunk al actually worked hard enough to be awarded a degree

and i actually let other men alone in spite of wearing the same color lip lipstick as the upper bracket

broads and now we were guaranteed safe al had earned a right to wear a little round bonnet edged with rabbit fur

and i fortunate among all women could now look forward to being the wife of a full professor someday

instead of just an instructor they really seemed charming people whispered about us in the discreetest drawing

rooms of lunch a small dinner perhaps suddenly we were like catnip after all those blessed months of being

stinkweed the closed doors swung open and we found ourselves drowning in a sea of burgundy's proudest vintages

cognac's fire snails pates always a great chilled fish in toto on a platter

venison pheasants and dozen rich brown odorous baths intricate ices and well-laced beaten

creams and all of them served to the weighty tune of polite conversation part condescending and part

odd it was just too much for us the unsuspected strain of getting ready for the doctorate and then this well-meant

deluge of hospitality hospitable curiosity made us feel that we must press

lettuce leaves upon our brows or die coolness and that is why we were hiding in the

buffet that cold november night we suddenly felt rested knowing the train was almost there for us we would

send telegrams i would write letters we would explain our friend the porter piled us into the compartment we shook hands

the train shivered for a minute and then started to pull northward

it was early morning when we got to strasbourg by then we were numb with weariness we went across the big square

in front of the station to a hotel and it wasn't until almost 18 hours later that we woke up enough to realize

that we were in the biggest bed either of us had ever seen it must have been 10 feet across and it was clean and very comfortable

and we felt fine our watches had stopped and when we telephoned to the clerk we found that it was long after midnight

he sent us up some cold sausages and rolls and beer we ate every crumb and lipped licked the

foam from stein rims and then slept again for several hours when we awoke the second time we felt

even finer al had his precious doctorate and we were in love and strasbourg lay before us we bathed

and dressed and went out into the icy streets there were already little ranks of fur trees

in the place clay bear and gingerbread stands readied for christmas we went to the

marshall house it was almost objectionably quaint but downstairs there was a cozy little tap room

and upstairs in the small restaurant the food was always better better than good we sat

in big soft leather chairs and on the dark table was a bowl of the first potato chips i ever saw in europe

not the uniformly thin uniformly golden ones that come out of wax bags here at home but light and dark thick and paper thin

fried in real butter and then salted casually with the gross owl served in the country with the potafu they were so good

that i ate them with the kind of slow sensuous concentration that pregnant women are supposed to feel for chocolate cake

at three in the morning i suppose i should be ashamed to admit that i drank two or maybe three glasses

of red pork in the same strange private orgy of enjoyment it seems impossible but the fact remains

that it was one of the keenest gastronomic moments of my life

1936-1939 the french dictionary says is a grazing

ground or a pasture but when we brought bought our home in switzerland and found that it had been

called a paqui for several centuries by all the country people near it we knew that it meant much more than

pasture to them the word had a tenderness to it like the diminutive given to a child or

a pretty girl like the difference between the words lamkin and lamb one reason our picky had this special

meaning was that it was almost the only piece of land in all the abrupt terraced steeps of the

wine coast between lausanne and vevay that did not have grapes on it instead it was a sloping green meadow

held high in the air above lachlan by stone walls a brook ran through it under pillared

willows and old trees of pears and plums and apples bent away from the pushings of the lake

winds the ancient soil was covered with a dazzling coat always low and filled with violets and premiums and

crocuses in the spring waist high with such flowers in summer as i have only seen like shadows in real

gardens they would be delicate in the beginning of the year blue hepaticas along the icy brook

and all the tinder yellow things and then as the summer came and the time for harvesting the colors grew more intense more

violent until finally the wild asper asters bloomed the flowers that meant

all the village girls must go into the vineyards again to cut the grapes three times every summer the man across

the road reaped our hay while we could not bear to look and then in a week or so the flowers were back

again pushing and growing and covering all the short grass with a new loveliness while the fruits ripened and the little

brook ran busily there was a fountain too near the road by the stone house it had been there for

longer than even the federal maps showed and people walking up the long pull from lake level knew it as well as they knew

their mothers and stopped always to drink and rest their backs from the pointed woven baskets they wore

even after we came and planted more trees and added rooms to the house they continued to stop at the fountain

and that made us feel better than almost anything else and all those things the fresh spouting water the little

brook under the willows the old rich bending trees the grass so full of life there on the terraced wine

slopes laced by a thousand tiny vineyards they were why when the peasants said le

paquet they meant the dear little meadow or the sweet cool resting place

or something like that but much more so we started a garden before the ground

thawed while the italian masons burned their fingers on the cold stones for the new part of our house we had to

make all the beds in small terraces hard work in the beginning but wonderful to work in later when the paths were set

and the little patches lay almost waist high waiting to be cared for as soon as we could we planted while we

kept on building walls and cultivating the rich loam and by the time my father and mother came to see us at our apartment

down on the market square in vevay because the house was not yet ready the peas were ripe and the evenings were

softly warm we would go up into the hills from town after the working men had left and spread our supper cloth on a table

under the terrace apple tree among all the last rubble of the building as fast as father and chabray

could pick the peas mother and i would shell them and then on a little fire of shavings i'd cook them perhaps four or five

minutes in a heavy casserole swirling them in butter and their own steam we'd eat them with little cold

pullets cooked for us in vive and good bread and the thin white wine of the coast that lay about us

the evening breeze would freshen across the long sweep of the lake and as the savage alps blackened above

the water and it turned to flat pewter over the edge of the terrace the first summer lights of evienne far

down towards geneva winked red at us it was always hard to leave we'd put our

thing silently into the baskets and then drive with the top of the car lowered along the narrow walled roads of the

corniche until we came to a village where we could sit again on a terrace and drink bitter coffee in the darkness

chabray was a fine gardener he read books and liked to experiment with new ways of doing things

and besides all that he had the feeling of growth and fertility and the seasons in his bones and in his flesh

i learned all the time from him and we worked together two summers at le pake peasants of our village and all the

vineyardists thought we were crazy not to leave such work for hired gardeners gardeners who knew they used to lean

over the walls watching us occasionally calling suggestions and it embarrassed us when often or than not we did things as

they had never been done before there in the district and got much better results for less effort in less space

that seemed almost like cheating when we were newcomers and foreigners too but why should we put in 50 tomato

plants with elaborate steaks as our neighbors told us to do when we could get as much fruit from 10

plants put in the way we thought best chabray studied the winds the soil the way the rains came

and he knew more about how to grow things than the peasants could have learned in a thousand years in spite of their

cruel toiling he felt truly apologetic about it our garden grew and grew and we went almost every day up the hill

to the sanatorium for poor children with the back of our little green fiat filled with fresh things to eat

i canned often too we had three cellars and i filled one of them with beautiful gleaming jars for the winter

it was simple enough to do it in little bits instead of in great harried rushes as my grandmother used to

and when i went down into the coolness and saw all the things sitting there so richly quiet on the shelves

i had a special feeling of contentment it was a reassurance of safety against hunger very primitive and very

satisfying i canned tomatoes and beans and vegetable juices and many kinds of pickles and ketchups

more for the fun of it than because we wanted them and plums and peaches and all the fruits

i made a few jams for company and several big jars of branded things i was lucky nothing spoiled everything was good when

we left before the war came it was hard to give up all the bottles of liqueurs not yet ripe enough to taste

harder than anything except the bottles in the wine cellar some still resting from their trips from burgundy and all our own wine made from

the little yellow grapes of our vineyard for the two years past in spite of the full shelves in the

cellar though and our trips up the hill for the children and the baskets we took to friends in vevay whenever we could stop

gardening long enough to go down things grew too fast for us it was the oldest soil either of us had ever

touched and it seemed almost bursting with life just as it was alive with insects and little creatures and a hundred kinds of

worms waiting to eat what grew in it we ran a kind of race with it excite exciting and exhausting

one time chabray put down his hoe and said loudly by god i'll not be dictated to i'll show you who's boss

he was talking to the earth and like a dutiful wife i followed him up past the violently fertile terraces to the house

and listened while he telephoned to the casino at evian and reserved a table in the main dining room and ordered an astonishing meal and

the wines for it i despaired somewhat in dressing my nails were rough and stained and i was too thin and much too brown

for the dress i wanted to wear and high heels felt strange on my feet but by the time we had driven over the

oak niche to lausanne right into the setting sun and had sat at a little deck table on the way to avienne

wrapped in a kind of sleepy silence that those lake boats always had for us i felt more beautiful than possible and

i knew that shibrae in his white dinner coat and his white top nut was that way too the maider d and the

barman and the sommelier agreed and when we got to the casino it was a decadent delightful night

but when we drove into la paquet in the first shy sunlight we shed our city clothes and bathed and put on dungarees again

and hurried down into the garden we had been away too long we grew beautiful salads a dozen different kinds and several

herbs there were shallots and onion and garlic and i braided them into long silky ropes and hung them over the rafters in the

attic in one of the cellars we stored cabbage and apples and tomatoes and other things on slatted shelves or

in bins and all the time we ate what we were growing the local cuisine was heavy a wintry

diet influenced by the many german swiss who lived nearby i talked more with the italian swiss and

learned ways of cooking vegetables in their own juices with sweet butter or a little thick olive oil to encourage

them tomatoes and onions and sweet peppers and eggplants and all the summer things

and chabray could fry tomatoes the way his family cooked maddie did in delaware so that the slices were dark

brown and crisp all the way through and yet delicate and tender sometimes we made corn oysters we'd sit right by the

stove and lift the shaggy little cakes from the hot butter onto our plates and float them down with beer

chilled in our fountain the part of the house we added to the little stone

building was i suppose quite impractical for anyone but us it disturbed and shocked the architect

and all the contractors for floor and plumbing and such because it was designed so that we the owners of the place

could be its cooks and servants that was not becoming to our station we got what we wanted though and the

kitchen and pantry were part of the living room up and down a few steps around a corner or two so that music and talk and fine

smells moved at liberty from one to the other it was fun to invite swiss people there for meals they were baffled and

titillated once in the winter i remember some oddly mixed expatriates and a french swiss friends came from montreal they

knew us only in restaurants and as an and as dancing partners and such until then

because we were too content alone at le pake to invite many others there

and they were frankly curious about the house and the way we lived so different from anything they knew

because it was winter and the dormant garden gave us leisure chabray and i had made everything ready long before

they came after conventional canapes for the conventional people we knew our guests to be

so they would not be alarmed at the start we planned to let them serve themselves in the kitchen

from a large pot of really masterful stew and a big salad and a basket of crisp rolls made up in

the village that afternoon then there was to be a chilled bowl of pears baked in a way i'd evolved with

honey and kirsch and served with sour cream in the kitchen there was only the casserole on top of the stove

while the salad chilled in the cellar with the dessert and the rolls waited warmly in a napkin lined basket out of

sight plates and silver tools looked like part of a pattern on the old dresser the ventilator wore it almost silently

and in the wide deep windows my ferns moved a little there were pictures on the walls and cookbooks mix mixed with pewter plates

on the open shelves and it was indeed a deceptive place to be called a kitchen in the average vocabulary when the

people came they exclaimed as everyone did at the first side of the big living room with the windows looking over the

terrace and the far lake into another land then almost frightened by the distance of their vision

they came down near the fireplace and comforted the comforted themselves with its warmth and the reassurance of the drinks

waiting for them on the long oak table in many polite ways they began to ask about the house was it true we had no

servants living with us and only part-time help from the village but how but what but they began to look alarmed thinking of

their long cold drive from montreal to this strange place without a dining room without a cook or even a maid and when

they wandered up the stairs into what they could only guess to be a kind of staged kitchen they saw no signs and smelled no smells

of supper their faces were long and dismal under all the politeness chabray and i let them suffer until we

thought the alcoholic intake was fairly well adjusted to their 12 or 15 rather jaded bodies

then with the smug skill of two magicians we flicked away the empty glasses and the tired canapes

and slid the salad and the rolls into place on the old dresser he gave the reco a few odorous stirs

while i saw that the little tables in the living room were clear of ashtrays and such and the puzzled hungry people almost

hittering with relief and excitement flocked like children into the kitchen for their suppers they ate and ate and talked as they had not

dared to talk for too many years and laughed a great deal [Applause]

1937 1939 the beginnings of war and chaos and

death had been swirling around us in switzerland for years i saw it most closely most

vividly on the sea voyages i took back and forth

from the continent to america i went back alone to america to tell my family i was going to get a divorce from mal

shubrey said why not write it i had no answer i felt i must do it myself a kind of castigation for hurting good

people the first three days aboard the large dutch ship were rough but not enough to

make me feel as i did i was prostrated not seasick the way stewardesses wanted me to be but flattened

boneless with despair at having gone away from chebrae it was the strongest physical reaction i'd ever felt in my

life and i was frightened and dazed it was a bitter period

something inside me stronger than my stubbornness was punishing me for leaving chabrae when there was to be

so little time for us left together when i finally got up and looked at the rest of the ship and that the people on

it i found myself plunged into an atmosphere so much more tortured than my own

that it was more sickening than my private will could possibly have been almost everyone aboard was fleeing there

were a few dutch american businessmen a few stiff racial snobs who ate and sat and gambled apart

and the rest were jews most of them had gone from austria to holland then as things grew steadily worse

they'd finally managed to leave holland for america they were doctors many of them wondering how they could pass state

examinations after 30 or 40 years of practicing and cruel months of stagnation in labor

camps in first class they walked quietly up and down with little dictionaries or stood not speaking to anyone watching

the swift gray waters there were a few who talked with me one was a short tired old man who shyly

drank beer with me and asked about texas where he had a grand niece who might possibly welcome him i helped him with

his dictionary words and the day we docked he said you must have children soon here is my address in texas

i want to deliver them for you free for friendship you know the other was a lean white-haired editor

from berlin he had owned one of those slick reviews that after the last war made german photographic technique famous especially

pictures of nude young girls with long jade cigarette holders and apple blossoms trembling against spring skies

he prowled restlessly about the ship like a man in great pain and occasionally he sat in the chair next to mine and talked very wittily in

french about the reason for hitler's new order in his country in second class the people were poorer

and younger they were less resigned and their eyes even while they played chess or deck tennis were ferociously

resentful most of them were doctors or lawyers many with girls they had married in holland the blonde wives spoke quite freely and

even calmly about their flights but the dark repressed men said very little and played games and smoked

they had cameras and find medical tools which they hoped to sell in america because they were allowed to bring no

money with them and like all the others they must go to stay with unknown relatives and in third class the people were small

bent furtive true products of the pogrom and the ghetto i knew that somewhere in

the beauty and love and even hate still lived but they were the victims the true victims malnourished for centuries into

these silent shivering little creatures

about two years later shibrae and i came back to america again we wanted to be on the champlain because

he had enjoyed it so often but it was retry retired the degrasse was a ship i think

there were only 20 passengers and i was the only woman i don't know how we ever got to new york

by this time shabre was dying really and in revolt at the whole cruel web of clinics and specialists and

injections and rays we had run away from in europe as if we knew that nothing could be worse

than what was happening there to us we were without nurses for the first time in months it was a very rough crossing

and i still wake up shaking sometimes to remember how i prepared hypodermics between rolls of the ship

we were bolstered by the wine of freedom really and i don't think anything could have daunted us truly we went to meals whenever the motion

permitted and chabray would invent dances down the empty corridors on his one leg and the crutches so that

when we went to the dining room we were always laughing wildly

the captain sent me flowers once or twice because he knew chabray was so ill and after i thanked him for having

caviar at his dinner he presented me with a large tin of it when we left the ship he was always

polite and personal but the note with the caviar said pain cannot touch the loving hearted

we knew what was happening and how to cope with it as long as he lived and we were like two happy ghosts i

really think we were charmed so that doors opened and people smiled shyly and everywhere there was decency

and cleanliness and light it sounds fatuous to say it but it was so we had to go back to switzerland to

close our house forever and sell many of our goods and to get medicine for him figured coldly to last as long as he did

and that sounds not fatuous but grim and ugly and it never was we were then immune to everything that summer

everything that could hurt us couldn't hurt us

we went to france and back again on the normandy both times in the same beautiful room which was in first class

but right next to the door into second second was easier for chabray smaller and with fewer stairs and such

the normandy was the loveliest ship i ever saw it wasn't a ship the way the little dutch one had been but at the same time there was nothing

vulgar or pretentious or snobbish about it like some of the others shavings to the lounge where we sat in

soft chairs by the glass wall and looked out past the people setting themselves to the blue water we drank champagne or

sometimes beer slowly and talked and talked to each other because there was so much to say

and so little time to say it i have probably talked more to chabrae and he to me

than to all the other people put together in both of our lives we often wondered about it how we could

talk so much and never bore each other the wine served perhaps as a kind of delicate lubricant but without it

it would have been the same then we went slowly down to lunch we had a table near the door easy for

chabray and there we watched the people coming in and out and drank more beer or a good wine whatever we've started with

we ate lightly but well by then we knew just about what shiburi needed and could stand and although i ate more than he it was

in the same way not grimly because we must still live but with much enjoyment

always and after lunch we rested it sounds silly but the way we had to move about and even sit down or sneeze was a great deal

of work for both of us in order to stay still self-controlled and blissful the way we were

we did have to rest a good deal about four o'clock we would go up to the lounge again and turn our backs on the

ocean to watch a movie we had never liked movies but this time sitting in the slowly rolling gently

shaking body of the great ship watching the artful foolery unwind on the screen they seemed a natural part of

the whole trance-like voyage we were making we sat in great soft sheds lounges with little tables beside us

on a kind of private balcony and for the first time in my life i drank pearnos if there was one film we drank each one

in small sips until the end and if there were two films we drank each two i cannot imagine drinking them any place

else but then they were perfect in a quiet comforting way and very clean to the throat and before dinner we drank more

champagne watching the sun set through the thick glass walls and after dinner which we sometimes

ordered at noon to please our waiter who was convinced we were starving to death we drank still more or sometimes cognac

then we went to bed again and two or three times in the night we would start talking and eat a few of the

little sandwiches the worried waiter sent down to us and drink some hot consummate or more brandy

even when new york loomed near us we felt outward bound i bent gently at my fingers i seemed

beautiful witty truly loved the most fortunate of all women past the sea changes and with all of her

hungers fed the flaw 1939

there was a train not a particularly good one that stopped at vevay about 10 in the

morning on the way to italy shibrae and i used to take it to milano it had a restaurant car an old-fashioned

one with the agreeable austerity of a third class station cafe about it brown wooden walls and seats

bare tables unless you ordered the highest priced lunch and a few faded advertisements for

asperina bayer permanently crooked above the windows there was one table next to the galley

where the cooks and the waiter sat in the morning they would be talking and sorting greens for salad and cutting the tops off radishes for

the hors d'oeuvres and in the early afternoon they would eat enormously of some things that had been on the menu

and some that certainly had not there was always a big straw wrapped flask of red wine with them

sometimes they had chef smoked while he drank or read parts of a newspaper allowed but usually he worked with his

helpers and if one or two of the waiters sat there he worked too we like to go into the restaurant partly

because of the cooks who after a polite salute ignored us and partly because of the waiters who were always the same ones

of course it is impossible that they were on every train that went to milano through the va at 10 in the morning but they were on that train every time

we took it so that very soon they knew us and laughed and even patted shibrae's shoulder delightedly when we appeared

we always went into their car a few minutes after we started after we had been seen by the conductor and what few travelers there were on

this unfashionable train the restaurant would be empty at that hour of course except for the table of amiably chattering cooks

we would order a large bottle of asti swamanti that delighted the waiters whether it was the young smooth one or

the old sour withered one we would sit drinking it slightly warm from the thick train goblets

talking and watching the flat floor of the valet grow narrow narrower and wilder waiting as always

with a kind of excited dread for the first plunge into the simplion the champagne would

stay stay in us in that familiar familiar ordeal we'd drink gratefully feeling the train's way

knowing a small taste of death and rebirth as all men do in swift passage through a tunnel

when we came out finally into the light again and the high mountains we'd lift our glasses silently to each other

and feel less foolish to see that the cooks too had known the same nameless stress as we then people would

begin to come in for lunch and we'd go back to our compartment the younger waiter would always call us when there were only a few more people

to serve in an hour or so usually both waiters took care of us they seemed to find us strange and

interesting enough to crack their cosmic on we and in some way fragile so they protected us they would come

swaying down the aisle as we ate crying there will be a few bumps hold tight hold tight monsieur madame i will hope

to help you then they would grasp the wine and usually my arm and we would it's true make a few mild grading noises over some

repairs in the road then they would gasp with relief and scuttle away one more crisis safely passed it made us feel a little

silly but it was fun too almost everyone likes to feel pampered by public servants

the young waiter with the smooth almond face was more given to the protective gestures equally lavished on chebray or

meat to avoid any misunderstandings but the older one whose body was bent and whose face was truly the most

cynical i've ever seen was the one who watched our eating he hovered like an evil visage hawk

while we ordered and we soon found that instead of advising changes then he would simply substitute in the

kitchen what he preferred to have us enjoy that day after the first surprise it was fun but we always kept up the bluff of looking

at the menu and then watching him pretend to memorize our order one thing he permitted us simplicity the people who traveled on

the train were the kind who liked plain food and plenty of it the menu miter might not list meat or

list meat or fish but it always had pasty of some kind and lentils or beans cooked with herbs

and of course fine honest garden salad then there would be one or two antipasti the radishes we had washed being fixed

and butter for them in rather limp and curls and hard boiled eggs and sliced salami

there would be cheese for dessert with fruit fat cherries or peaches or grapes or oranges according to the season and always green

almonds in the spring the people ate well and even if they were very poor

and brought their own bread and wine into the restaurant they ordered a plate of beans or a one egg omelet with dignity which

was no rebuke to the comparative prodigality around them the two waiters served them with nonchalant skill

and everyone seemed to agree that chabrie and i should be watched and fed and smiled at with extra care

why are they like that why are they so good to us all the people we would ask each other i knew reasons for him and he knew some

for me but for the two of us it was probably because we had a sort of palpable trust in each

other simple people are especially conscious of that sometimes it's called love or

good will whatever it was in us the result was mysterious and warming and we felt it

very strongly in places like the restaurant car to milano always until the last time

and that was in the summer of nineteen thirty nine we were two ghosts by then our lives as

normal living humans had ended in the winter in delaware with chabray's illness and when we got word

that we should go back to our old home in switzerland and save what we could before the war finally started

we went not so much for salvage because possessions had no meaning anymore to us but because we were helpless to do

anything else we returned to the life that had been so real like fog or smoke caught in a current of

air we were very live ghosts and drank and ate and saw and felt and made love better

than ever before with an intensity that seemed to detach us utterly from real life

everywhere there was a little of that feeling the only difference was that we were safely dead and all the other

people that summer were laughing and singing and drinking wine in a kind of catalepsy were like cancerous patients made happy

with the magic combination of opiate before going to the operating theater we had finished with all that business

and they had still to go through it they looked at us with a kind of envious respect knowing that war was coming to

them but that we were somehow past it and everywhere we went except the one time on the milano train

we moved beatifically incommunicado archangels on leave none could touch us just as none could

be harmed by our knowledge of pain yet to be felt the train was the same by then we had

grown almost used to miracles and when the young almond-faced waiter stood in the door the compartment and gaped helplessly at seeing as we

laughed he stammered and sputtered all the time shaking our hands and laughing and it was plain that he had buried us long

since when he saw what had happened to shabri he turned very red and then said quickly trying not to

stare but the asti at once it will be very chic to drink it here and before we could tell him how

much we wanted to drink it in the old restaurant car and look once more at the faded aspirin signs and listen to the cooks he was

gone it was necessary for him to disappear and we were used by then to having people do impetuous things

when they first saw us ghosts come back so far and the way we looked and what had happened to chabray we

sighed and laughed because even that was funny it really was the boy brought the

champagne wrapped elegantly in a red czech napkin for the first time he was suave and mischievous again and it was plain

that he felt like something in a paper-bound novel serving fair wine that way at 11 in the morning in a

first-class compartment he swayed with exaggerated grace to the rocking of the car and he flipped suit from the little wall

table like the head waiter at the cafe de la pay at least we saluted him with our first

taste hiding our regret and having to be gentry and drink where he thought it was chic the wine was the same warm and almost

sickish and we looked quietly at each other with delight here it was one more miracle

but it see on before the tunnel three nazis got on bulbas with knapsacks and a kind of

sweaty health we huddled against the windows not invisible enough and i wondered how we could ever get past all those

strong brown hairy legs to the corridor but there in the doorway almost before the train started again stood the little

waiter his face was impassive but his eyes twinkled and yet were motherly pardon he muttered

and before we knew it the german tourists were standing trying to squeeze themselves small and the boy was

whisking us expertly nonchalantly out of the compartment down the rocking aisle and into our familiar hard brown seats

in the restaurant it was all the same and we looked about us with a kind of wonder the old waiter saw us from the

end of the car his face did not change but he put down his glass of wine and came to our table

the boy started to say something to him in an italian dialect it was like knee swiss but the old man motioned him bruskly

aside his face was still the most cynical i had ever seen but his eyes were overfilled full with

tears they ran slowly down his cheeks for a few minutes into the evil old wrinkles

and he didn't wipe them away he stood by the table flicking his napkin and asking crankily if we had

made a good trip and if we plan to stay long in milano we answered the same way things about traveling in the weather

we were not embarrassed any more than he was by his tears like all ghosts i suppose we had grown

used to seeing them in other people's eyes and along with them we saw almost always

a lot kind of gratitude as if people were thanking us maybe for coming back and for being so trustful

together we seem to reassure them in a mysterious way that summer more than ever while the old

man was standing there talking with his own gruff eagerness about crops and storms flicking the table he had to step in behind my chair for a

minute while three men walked quickly through the car two were big not in uniform but with black shirts under their hot musty coats

and stubble on their faces the man between them was thin and much younger and although they went

single file and close together we saw that he was handcuffed to each of them before that

summer such a thing would have shocked us unutterably so that our faces would be paler and our eyes wider

but now we only looked up at the old waiter he nodded his own eyes got very hot and dried all the tears political

prisoner he said flicking the table and his face was no more bitter than usual escaped they're bringing him back to

italy then the chef with the highest bonnet saw us and beamed and raised his glass and the others turned around from their

leafy table and saluted us too and the door slammed behind the three dark men we got through the tunnel that

time without feeling our palms grow sticky it was the only difference the train was the same the people were the same

we were past the pain and travail and that was all we were in violet we drank the rest of

the osti and as people began to come into lunch we made the signal to the suddenly active boy that we would be back later just then

there were shouts and thuds and the sound of shattering glass a kind of silence fell all about us in spite of the steady

rattle of the train the old waiter ran down the car not bumping a single table and the door at the end closed sharply behind him

people looked strangely at one another gradually the air settled as if the motors inside all the

travelers had started to hum again and the young waiter took orders for lunch when he got to us he said without

looking at us in his bed fringe i suggest that monsieur madame attend a moment the restaurant is not crowded

today as a suggestion it had the icy command of a policeman or a guardian angel about

it and we sat meekly instead of leaving there was no more champagne but it did not really bother us finally the old man

came hurriedly back into the car his face was furious and he clutched his shoulder the traveler stared at him

still chewing he stopped for a minute by our table he was panting and his voice was low he tried to jump through the window he

said and we knew he was talking about the refugee the bastards they tore my coat

he flapped the ripped shoulder of his greasy old black jacket at us and went madly down to the galley muttering and

trembling we stood up to go and the smooth almond-faced waiter again hurried towards a swaying with the downhill rush

of the train under a big tray of hot vegetables i'm bringing monsieur madame's order at once

he called we sat down obediently we were being bullied but it was obvious that he was trying to protect us and it was kind of

him he brought us two glasses of a dark vermouth and as he put them in front of us he said confiding

a special bottle we carry for the chef very appetizing there is a little must on the platform

this year madame it will be swept up when you have finished sante

as we lifted our glasses willy-nilly he cleared his throat and then he said in english cheerio he

smiled at us encouragingly like an over-attentive nurse and went back to serving the other people the vermouth was bitterer than any we'd

ever tasted almost like a swiss gentian drink but it tasted good after the insipid wine

when we went through to our compartment there was indeed a neat pile of broken glass on the platform

between the cars and the window of the door that opened when the train stopped was only half filled the top part of the pane was gone

and the edge of the rest curved like ice in a smooth fine line almost invisible the nazis leapt

politely to attention when we got back to our compartment and subsided in a series of small waves of questions in

english did smoke bother me did we mind the door open did we feel a draft

i forget the name of the town now where the train stops and the passport men come on is it dominosola how strange not

to know it's as if i've deliberately wiped from my mind a great many names some of them i thought would stay there

forever where that whether i wanted them to or not like old telephone numbers that suddenly come between you and the

sound of a new love's voice i never thought to disremember this town that man such and such a river was it dominosola

that day we were there a long time they seemed more policeman than usual but it was always that way in italy we

got the questions of visas and money straightened out that used to upset me and i'd feel like a blushing diamond smuggler when the

hard-eyed customs man would look at me this time it was easy so unimportant i

kept thinking it would be a good idea to walk back to the restaurant car while the train was quiet but chabray said no

we should wait for the boy to call us finally we started very slowly we went past a lot of road work men were

building beds for new tracks with great blocks of greystone and the germans looked at them with a grudging fascination leaning over better

to see and exclaiming softly we were glad when the young waiter came to the door your table is ready monsieur madame he

announced loftily and the men stood up hastily to let us out when we got to the end of the car the boy turned back take

take care please he said to chabray there is there is a little humidity

on the platform and the place was soaking wet right enough the curved piece of glass was still in

the window but it and the walls and the floor were literally dripping with water and

we didn't know why we went carefully through it and into the almost empty restaurant

the boy brought us some good wine a fairly expensive red chianti we always drank on that train and we began to eat

bread and salami i remember there were some of those big white beans the kind that italians peel and eat with salt

when they're fresh and tender in the early summer they tasted delicious so fresh and cold

it was good to be eating and drinking there on that train free forever from the troubles of life

surrounded with a kind of insulation of love the old waiter came through the car he was going to pass our table without

looking and chabray spoke to him stop a moment he said your coat how is it the man turned without

answering so that we could see the neat stitches that held his sleeve in place i said something banal about the sewing

how good it was and should bray ask quietly the man the prisoner did he get away

the old man suddenly looked at us and his eyes were hateful as if he loathed us he said something

foul and then spat it's none of my business he hurried away we could not even turn

to watch him it was so shocking we sat without any movement for quite a time

i could feel my heart beat heavily in my throat was as if it was in an iron collar

the way it used to be when chabray became first ill finally i looked at the few people still eating and it seemed to me

as if they met my eyes with a kind of hatred too not as awful as the old man's but

crouching there there was fear in it and fear all around me chabray's face was full of pain it was the first time it

had come through for weeks the first time since we started to drift like two happy ghosts along the current of our lives together

the iron collar tightened to see it there i tried to drink some wine but i couldn't swallow more than once

the young waiter hurried past us without looking and chabris stopped him firmly please he said what is wrong what has

happened the boy looked him passively at us and for a minute i thought he was going to be rude and then he whispered still

protecting us eat monsieur madame i will tell you in a minute and he hurried off to the galley

bending supply under the last great tray of emptied plates yes you'd better eat something chabris

said you've drunk rather a lot he picked up his fork and i did too when we were the only ones left in the car

the boy came back he stood leaning against the table across the aisle still swaying with the motion of the train

but now as if he were terribly tired and he talked to us so far softly that we could hardly hear him

there was no friendliness in his voice but there was not hatred he said that when the train had stopped at domidosla

or wherever the border was the political prisoner was being taken off and suddenly he laughed

and pressed his throat down on the edge of the broken window pane the old waiter saw it that was probably

the plan in the first place the boy said the poor bastard was chained to the cops there was no escaping

it was a good job he said the border police helped clean up the platform that was why the train stopped so long

we're making up time now all right the boy said looking admiringly at the rocky valleys flash past us the

old man keeps fussing about his coat oh well by the time we got to milano everything was

almost all right again but for a few minutes of course the shell had completely cracked the world had seeped in we were not

two ghosts safe in our own immunity from the pain of living chabray was a man with one leg gone the

other leg and two arms soon to go a racked man with snowy hair and eyes large with

suffering and i was a woman condemned plucked at by demons

watching her own true love die much too slowly there in the train hurrying across the

ripe fields feeling the trance waiting of the people everywhere

we knew for a few minutes that we had not escaped we knew that no knife of glass no

distillate of hatred could keep the pain of the war outside i felt illimitably old there in the train

knowing that escape was not peace ever n is for nautical and inevitably for

nostalgia in my own alphabet dinners aboard ship have a special poignancy for me

partly because i have not sailed anywhere so since i went with the normandy on her last fateful

crossing but mostly because i have always been in love at sea so that each bite i took was savored

with an intensity peculiar to the moment i think i am not alone in this particular juxtaposition

of two words for in

early in my travelings i found that for my own peace of mind i must shun most of my fellow passengers i could not

cope with their behavior there at sea level where so many social inhibitions went overboard

with the protocol of stuffiness on one hand and the lacentia's whoring on the other

i work out my own pattern dictated by my condition of the moment i slept in red rolling like a delicately

balanced log with the ship until noon then after various severity dabblings i went to the bar not the main

one but a tiny place familiar with leather chairs and peanuts and bowls and a discreetly

gossipy man named some variation of fritz who poured fine beer or made impeccable martinis

i took beer and i could have been in the lausanne palace or the ritz or or there was dignity about the very

banality of the place i sensed it and sat back watching fritz's ears pricked to gossip

and his busy eyes flickered cynically over this sleek flattened faces in front of him then i

went to lunch not in the dining salon but in a little restaurant where i had engaged my table

before the ship sailed i ate and drank and ate and drank and in a drugged way

it was fun i always skipped tea just as i skipped breakfast and the mid-morning consummate and

crackers even though tea had a ghoulishly interesting concert that came with it

the ritual of dressing is a pleasure so removed from the present that i look back on it

with much the same helpless emotion that i feel about a 10 pound tin of caviar a friend brought me to

dijon from moscow in 1931. i can only dream of its present impossibility

as i do of the hot water and the countless towels and the dreamy leisure before dinner ordered and advanced from

a sheet which had nothing to do with the vulgar printed menu of the main dining salon i drank either

champagne or two very dry martinis depending on whether the captain's chart marked

the wind velocity at three or at seven dinner in the club which suddenly might sprout orchids on its

walls or pine branches from the black forest behind which tired invisible cabin boys

toodled bird whistled dinner was indeed exquisite and then after dancing perhaps or talking in the

bar my bar him the best part of the pattern when i went to my cabin and there in the soft light by my bed

was the same curiously exciting and satisfying thing each night a split of my favorite champagne in a

little silver bucket and a silver plate of the thinnest sandwiches in the world

made knowingly of unbuttered fine bread slivered breast of chicken and a generous amount of cayenne pepper

i really do not understand what cord it was in my nature that always vibrated at

this site but human twang it did inevitably and still does in my mind

once while on a walking trip i discussed with great intensity the subject of the perfect dinner

i feel now that gastronomical perfection can be reached in these combinations one person dining

alone usually upon a couch or a hillside two people of no matter what sex or age dining in a

good restaurant six people of no matter what sex or age dining in a good home

the six should be capable of decent social behavior that is no two of them should be so much in love

as to bore the others nor at the opposite extreme should they be carrying on any sexual or professional feud which could put

poison on the plates all must eat from all six should be congenial in their vocabularies

that is they should be able to converse in one or more commonly understood languages and the words they use should be neither

too simple nor too elaborate for comprehension as for social hurdles they should not

exist

a meal which might be perfect for six well-chosen guests to enjoy and linger over in a small room amply

candlelit would per force depend upon the hundred aspects already hinted at

of place weather temperament and such hunger and fair to good health are basic requirements

given then six people two beautiful one intelligent three of correlated professions such as

architecture music and photography a cool autumn evening with perhaps enough wind outside to make the dining

room sound more like a haven than usual a good cook

i believe i have slyly kept last minute preparations to their minimum so i appear in

uninterested in anything but my guests we have martinis or sherry before we enter the dining room and red caviar

in a generous bowl it being easier to be generous with the red caviar than the black or the gray

just now there is thin dark bread with a pad of sweet butter and cut lemons

the dining room table is set with warm colors this being autumn reds brown handled knives strong plates

and sturdy goblets pink and purple grapes in the center a very blunt decoration indeed first we drink a hot

consummate double of equal parts clam juice and veal stock to carry the fish taste over to the coming meat

and laced with dry vermouth instead of sherry to interrelate the martinis and the wine to follow

that will be a firm rich burgundy too heavy for anything but celebrations

next comes an almost medieval platter of rump roast baked artfully with prunes and smothered in a sauce it falls under

the knife in hearty slices and there is a casserole of wide noodles and butter to go with it and take up some of the

heady juices the wine flows down happily the six people talk move with a new ease upon their seats

and in their skins then there is a large bland green salad made with a minimum of good wine vinegar

so as to leave unassaulted the strong tannic impact of the wine and gently toasted sourdough bread which

stays on the table for the next course of a hand account of cheeses on the board buttery gorgonzola

camembert impeccable grayers cheddar with a bite and a crumbling to it and double cream

as soothing as a baby's fingertip the wine improves especially in the third bottle

the candles begin to flicker there is bitter black coffee sitting carelessly beside the last bits of cheese

the last freckled crumbs of bread up front upon the cloth there is above all a kind of easiness

which at this point in my life both social and private i find more valuable than rubies for too

often now the world's woes press in like a tumorous growth upon our hearts

like a relentless balloon upon our tables like a sword upon our beds

if in the alchemy of hospitality some such ease as i have told of may be attained

it is to our general good and devoutly to be wished for and while better wider traveled wines

and rarer vans might be substituted for my menu based on local possibilities and my own purse

no no happier result could follow to my way of thinking

perhaps the most limited and at the same time most intricate form of the perfect dinner is

the kind eaten by one person then food takes strange forms and so indeed

does the position it is eaten in i figured that the peace and requisite relaxation of sitting by myself

in front of a little fire or in a shadowy patio in summer are worth the effort they take

occasionally they are in a way a kind of retreat i balance my day to their accomplishment

i arranged them as if i were sending a posie to jenny lynch with all the proper bows to protocol

finally i am there alone upon a shay's lounge or a tuffet i have according to the season my meat

and proper meat in the winter if i am indeed alone i drink some good vermouth

which seems increasingly hard to come by i need a little thinly sliced smoked salmon

and then a completely personal and capricious concoction shrimp or lobster tail or chicken in a thin artful sauce very

subtle indeed the kind i like to pretend would be loathed by anyone but me i eat it with a spoon and a fork i have

a piece of good toasted hand would hardly touch it and i sip from a large lone swedish

goblet all its mates being long since shattered a half bottle of well chilled fairly dry

white wine there is something delicately willful and decadent about drinking all alone

no matter how small the bottle and then after one look at the little dessert i painstakingly

made for myself sometime earlier that day i close the refrigerator door firmly

upon it and go to bed bolstered by books to be read and a hundred

unattended dreams to be dreamed

you