Algren at Sea (5 page)

At Pier 86 a blue-uniformed baggage-hustler took both bags and the typer off my hands, and I took the elevator. “How much does a baggage-hustler get per bag?” I asked the elevator guy.

“He gets what you want to give in your heart,” the guy instructed me.

“I don't want the man to work without shoes,” I explained. “How much does he get per bag?”

The elevator guy stopped the lift between floors. “Let me tell you something,” he reproved me; “the intelligence you breathe, that you were born with, let
that
be your guide.”

Then we continued going up.

I gave the bag-hustler a two-dollar bill and stood waiting for change. “That was a deuce I just gave you,” I reminded him.

“It's mouse eat mouse,” he informed me.

“Easy come, easy go,” I warned him, glad to get my bags back. But were I going to keep count of people who were out of their minds and those who were in them on this trip, the kooks would already be lapping the field.

However, I wasn't dismayed to learn it was mouse eat mouse and every man for himself now, more than it used to be; because whatever we have lost in brotherly feeling I am confident we have made up in spitefulness. Things work out best for everybody in the end if you just look at things right. Prospects for mice are particularly bright.

I had never crossed the Atlantic first class before. It was my first time.

My ticket assigned me to Stateroom S-1, meaning sundeck and first to chow, but a fellow in a seafaring cap told me to go to U-68. United States Lines had put me on a submarine was what I assumed. But the gangplank led up to some sort of seagoing department store that had three decks
below water level, so I went down. What traveling first class means, I gathered, is that you may be sent to the galleys but you still don't have to row.

I kept going down until I hit the engine room. As long as I was there I figured I might as well inspect the turbines and the rest of that crazy stuff. It looked in better shape for crossing an ocean than myself. The pin that kept my topcoat from flapping made me self-conscious among such well-groomed engines. I went upstairs to see if the captain would take time to sew a button on for me.

In U-68 my bags were waiting but there was nobody home. The vice president of U.S. Lines had left a personal message for me on the dresser, however:

I fell asleep on the gay lady of the seas and dreamed that so much ease had rubbed off on me that I was strolling around trying to rub some off on a roomy saloon. Until someone wakened me by hollering All Ashore That's Going Ashore outside my door. I got up and looked out of the porthole, and what did I see but the whole New York literary scene moving past me as if I were being towed.

I'd never see that scene again nearer than now. The people I had known there were being towed away too.

I had come to know two New York crowds: one that took its cut off the traffic in horses and fighters around St. Nick's Arena, and the other that took its cut off the traffic in books. Plungers and chiselers alike, I'd found, were less corrupt than Definitive Authorities on D. H. Lawrence. The corruption of the sporting crowd was that of trying to get two tens for a five off you, but the corruption of the throngs of cocktail Kazins went deeper. They were in need of something more than two tens for a five. The fight mob possessed that spirit and humor that comes of being oneself. But lack of any inner satisfaction in being alive had left the paperfishmen feeling deprived. They owned the formulas for morality, but couldn't make them good personally. All they carried within them was the seeds of their own disaster.

Each had had his own seed. Ambitiousness had made them inventive in making footnotes. And so, like paperfish, they became transparent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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