My last year as an artist in Europe was a sad year every place. In the night clubs grouped young men groped virginal silk to the whine of violins, a summer idyll at Nice had been wrecked in the thunderstorms of fall, and Lady Luck showed a great deal of spirit, but it was only of sheer contradiction.
My friend Sethos, who kept in condition for violin playing by taking fencing lessons and reading Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal to English governesses in the park, he too saw the trouble the year would hold.
“Yet to me an empty life is a perfect definition of happiness.”
“That's the noon apéritif talking,” I said.
“Stevie, your Lehrjahre and Wanderjahre are coming to an end. You talk like one going home.”
“I think so. I've learned a little.”
“No one can travel and still admire mankind. Or women. In love, Stevie, the strategy of flight is the only victory.”
But I wasn't in love, and Sethos went off, after telling me all experience is disappointing… art is the only creative force… too bad I had never studied the violin. Without art we live only on the fringes of awareness and never come fully awake… I must really take up the fiddle. With music only the present is real, the past and the future, as in life, are always shifting… he knew where I could get a good second-hand Dutch fiddle for two hundred francs.
What had been the wonderful days of “before 1929” faded away quickly in France, and there were a lot of us who turned our faces towards the setting sun and the taste of home cooking and the shape of the hills beyond Jersey City and St. Louis and Los Angeles. But how to bridge the big blue pond was a problem.
The days when saying one was an American and being given everything that one wanted—those days were over with the last rolled stocking on the last boy-legged flapper wearing the last bobbed hair in Europe. Sterner times were ahead, and grass was going to grow on Fifth Avenue, they told us.
Somewhere in New York were several dozen paintings I had painted, and waiting for me was an art show in one of those 57th Street show places where people brought their best manners and checkbooks. But I could not, at the time, get together enough change to buy out even the cigarette tray in a Russian night club.
My friend Sethos, the brown man who played first violin on the great ship “France,” came to me one day and smiled in that wonderful Egyptian way of his and said, “How would you like to fiddle on the “France”?
“I can't fiddle.”
“That is nothing,” said Sethos. “We need a second fiddle on the next crossing to New York.”
“Keep looking.”
“You want to go home.”
“Yes, I do.”
“I want to go home too, but you see I can't. There is the matter of the mother-in-law and my second wife, and the taxes I have not paid. But why should I bore you? Anyway, when a man wants to go home I want to help.”
“That's nice, Sethos… but I can't fiddle.”
Sethos grinned and took my arm. “Look… it is not the fiddling that matters… it's Belloc. He hires for the French Lines, the biggest crook that ever cut a young girl's throat. But if you please Belloc you get the job.”
“Why should he hire me?” I asked.
Sethos rubbed his brown cheeks and said, “Listen, my artist, France is full of holes… every day some rat pulls more of this wonderful country down a rat hole. Everything is for sale, everything can be had. Belloc likes to give jobs to people like you. You want passage… he wants your pay in his pocket. Well?”
“Second fiddle?”
“Like a second edition of a book… what value has it? Come on.”
We went to a small bar where they did open-fire cooking, and in a back room sat Belloc. He was a beautiful looking swine. Smooth as lard and made of the same stuff. He was as wide as he was tall, and he wasn't very tall. His face had been made by pushing a finger into suet to mark out eyes, nose, and mouth. He had some gray hair cropped close as a sheep-eaten lawn, and his fingers ended in dumplings, each dumpling having a ring on it. He had a pleasant voice and spoke like an educated man who had cheated at his exams.
He was drinking apple brandy when we came in.
“A job? Loyal je serai durant ma vie! I hire only the best. Shall we eat?”
“What have they here?”
Belloc smiled. “A beef, and with it l'oignon tarte.”
Onion pie with beef is something so rare here I might as well explain it. Make a crust of flour, lard, a little salt, and enough water to hold it all together. Fill a well-larded pie pan with the crust. Melt a half cup of butter and sauté three large onions chopped fine. When the golden color is perfect, sprinkle in three or four tablespoons of flour, stir in a half pint of cream. Add salt and pepper to taste and stir continually until the mixture is thick. Remove from the fire and add two well-beaten eggs. Pour the mixture into a crust, add a top crust, and bake in a hot oven for half an hour. Serve very hot with a slice of beef. Onion pie should really move across the Atlantic…
“Food is wonderful,” said Belloc. “A man who likes good food never gets into political trouble. Maybe this may seem simplified morality to you.”
Sethos said, “Simplified morality is staying out of jail and marrying the right girl, in time. But our friend wants a job.”
Belloc gave us the faint ambiguous smile of a demented Buddha.
“A girl? Ah, the thorn in the rose of love, cruel as rusting spears. More pie?”
“No, thank you. About the job.”
“Don't hurry a lunch. From the outside how can we ever understand the inside?”
I agreed.
“Of course,” said Belloc, “I like Americans.”
“I like the French,” I said.
“Fine, fine. You know I have a cousin.… an English writer, I think… so you see I am part American, almost. You want to be vegetable cook on the ship “France”?
Sethos shook his brown head. “Second violin.”
“Ah!” Belloc held some grapes in his hand and pushed the fruit out of the skins with his dumpling fingers and swallowed some of the pulp. “Second violin? Now if you wanted to be decksport marker, or dishwasher…”
“I want him near me,” said Sethos. “He doesn't know the ropes.”
“Second violin? I was thinking of hiring a Greek prince. Wonderful chap… a bit reactionary, but the British have promised him his palace back. While he was waiting, I thought a second violin job. But he would collect his pay… and you…”
I said I would turn it over to my friend, M. Belloc. M. Belloc nodded and pulled a much soiled paper from his pocket, made some notes on it, and then had me sign a slip of blue paper. After that there was nothing much to do but drink another round of wine and have Sethos pay for the meal.
Three days later I was on the boat train, and France passed by the window too fast, and the next time I was to see it I wasn't going to like it very much, but then who did in 1940?
The “France” looked even bigger than I remembered her, and I got on board by tipping the right people and went to look for Sethos, who had had to get down early to rub the violins with olive oil to keep the damp out of them. He said it was olive oil, but I have a feeling it was some secret formula of his own that the chef used for salad dressing. The music and the salads on the ship never amounted to very much.
I couldn't find Sethos but I did find a flunky in blue with much brass, and he looked down a long list, and chewed on the shortest pencil stub in the world.
“Longrue… Longrue. Ah yes.”
He made a ball of some dirty gray linen and hit me in the face with it. “Second class kitchen, third vegetable cook. Longrue, blow!”
“Wait a minute. I'm a second violin.”
“And I'm Walt Disney. This is Belloc's own list. Marches!”
“Like hell.”
“Then get off the ship. There will be a charge of fifty francs for the linen held for you.”
He took back his bundle of soiled laundry, and I stood there a moment thinking how sorry I was for myself. I didn't have the fare back to Paris and the pocket of the nearest friend… I took back the linen. “Brother, you just got yourself a vegetable cook.”
“Get along.”
The kitchen of the “France” was big, and it shook when the boat moved. There were enough cooks to keep a good-sized city well fed. My job was to stand over a huge copper vat and chop up vegetables which the second cook drowned in living steam and which the first cook seasoned with quarts of salt. After which I had to climb inside the vat and scrub it clean with towels tied to my feet. That is, I was supposed to, but I could always get the job done by giving an American cigarette to some garbage collector.
I spent the first two days (when not boiling vegetables alive) in the meat room, where the steers, in cut-up sides, were brought out to warm up after their cold storage. It wasn't a nice place, but a one-eyed fry chef, called Cadol Boursault, had made himself a hideout out of sides of mutton, and we used to sit there by the hour smoking, while he told me lies about Chicago (where he claimed his wife ran a respectable house and his son was the left machine gun in Al Capone's armored car).
The third day out I got up on deck to deliver some raw onions to the steward of the bar, and Sethos caught me between a deck game and a big game hunter showing off his best tiger skin.
“You are alive!” said Sethos.
“I am a vegetable cook. May your friend Belloc be peeled alive with a potato knife.”
“The rat! And me, I'm playing jazz with no second fiddle.”
“Well, I'll see you in New York.”
“No. Get out of those white rags, muss up your hair, and come with me.”
He dragged me down to the cabin where the band lived, a mouse nest filled with odd people who talked of Irving Berlin and Bach as if they were related. Sethos took me aside and put a rancid violin under my arm. “Now listen. All you need to know are the positions. When you hold it like this… we are playing the French national song. Like this, ”My Country 'tis of Thee.“ For jazz roll the eye balls and tap the feet and show all the teeth. For sweet smaltz, gypsy, or Alt Wien, look at the ceiling and close the eyes.”
“But what do I do with the fiddle?”
“Keep sawing wood. There is soap on the strings and you don't make the lowest sound. You are a silent violinist. Years ago I had Bing Crosby in a band crossing to England. He blew a horn with no mouthbit and sang two songs an evening. No one ever caught on. So?”
It was very easy work. We played at dinner. I wore Sethos' second best evening jacket and bedroom slippers, but they didn't show as I sat to one side, under some palm trees in brass pots full of cigarette butts.
After dinner we went down and had our dinner, and a very good dinner it was, as the headwaiter of the first-class dining rooms was a deserter from the French Army, and Sethos spent all his spare time forging a perfect passport for him. The headwaiter was a wonderful looking man who was related, he proudly said, to Pétain, the old soldier, but the old man hadn't made him anything more than a major. So the headwaiter was going to Beverly Hills to open a swank eating place.
He really knew food, and all through the war, when France was dying and the Germans were murdering Frenchmen, the headwaiter ran his wonderful Beverly Hills place and entertained all the rich French refugees who were waiting in California for the war to end. How nice of the Americans to win it for them. Crude people, Americans. Just good enough to fight for Europe…
While Sethos worked on the passport or practiced his swordsmanship on the ship's cat, the headwaiter cooked for us special little things, just to keep his hand in, he said. For Sethos, who had been away from home a long time, he made Dumyat Rozz, a dish of old Egypt, which turned out to be the best chicken giblets and rice I had ever had.
He would clean the giblets from four chickens, sauté them, and then chop them. He would brown two ounces of pine nuts in butter. After washing four cups of rice, he would add it to the pine nuts, one cup of seedless raisins, the prepared giblets, and cover the whole thing with one quart of chicken stock. This he would boil for one hour in a covered pot. Toward the end of the hour, he would add salt and pepper to taste, a clove of garlic, and some chopped parsley. Continue to boil it until it is almost dry. Serve with a salad of mint aspic. Very good.
The headwaiter used to watch us eat while he sipped a gin-and-orange bitters. He had the voluptuously flared nose of something like a newly designed airplane. His attitude was the kind that used to scare the Sabine women.
Sethos looked with tolerant superiority at his twelve-dollar shoes. “You will be a great success in Beverly Hills.”
“One hopes,” said the headwaiter. He looked like Hamlet, but talked like Schopenhauer. “The fattened calf never loved the prodigal son, huh?”
We agreed and went on deck to smoke some cigars and to see if Sethos knew any of the girls from other crossings; his morals had limits but not in the right places. Tourists, he said, clutched at life as if their girdles were slipping. Sex is like the opium habit, he explained: it takes a hard cure.
I regret to say he always ended the trip with something that looked as if it had been netted in the Gulf Stream.
I shall never forget the day America came leaping across the far bend of the horizon, first a scribble of mist, then a smudge of land and after that the shapes of buildings and rocks, all aglow in the salt reek of the turning tide off the Kill von Kull. And even Brooklyn on the lee shore looked good.
It also looked as if I had escaped the vegetable pots for good, but as we came up the Narrows the steward saw me and grabbed me. “So, that's what happens to our third vegetable cook. You'll go back to France in the brig.”
“I'm a fighting American,” I said (we had been drinking late, to finish off the bottles in the band rooms before docking; remember, this was during the speakeasy days). “You can't take me below without bloodshed.”
“Ah, so you want to be dragged back to France for taking money without working. Prepare yourself for trouble.”
I saw nothing to do but go back to the kitchen and wonder if I were going to be locked up and sent back to France. I had learned in France that the American Embassy or the State Department didn't do much for anyone who didn't have a letter from the president of General Motors or a healthy connection with a New York department store buyer.
In the kitchen there was trouble. A rich American countess (from Kansas City) had sent down for a fruit salad in aspic, and had sent down her own aspic, and the damn thing wouldn't jell! The chefs stood around cursing America, good food, and the habits of Kansas City (which they thought was in Kansas).
“And now you!” shouted my chef at me. “Not enough, we have to find you!”
“What's the trouble?”
“Your damned American aspics!”
I looked at the little box they threw at me. “Oh, Jello. You don't make it like the other aspics. Get me some boiling water.”
And I made them a fruit salad, and when the boat pulled in the countess was serving her friends fruit salad Kansas City and I was being checked off the boat by a customs officer who didn't trust my Picasso drawings and insisted they weren't art… so I said they were wallpaper for a speakeasy and he let me through. The first thing I did after getting a hotel room was to write a letter to the Jello people…
Sethos came over, smelling like a rose garden; he had a date later. “Ah, you are home now.”
“Yes, it looks pretty good. I used to worry over it.”
“All ultimate conclusions are worthless. Live, don't think.”
“Thanks.”
“We pay to be admired and take pay to admire others. But Stevie, it's different here. It's a big place, this America. It's not for me, but you, you fit?”
“I think so… if Europe hasn't spoiled me.”
“To forget, one must at a certain time practice constant recollection. Well, I must go. I have found a tomato, as you Americans call a girl.”
“Do we?”
But he was gone, so I called up a girl I knew in the Village, who kept a collie on a pekinese income, and when we got off the bus at Riverside and I looked across at the advertising signs on the Jersey side, I knew I was home. I bowed twice to the Jello sign.