Departure Read online

  Onion Soup

  WHEN THE PURSER, a tall, heavy-set Italian, entered the galley at seven o’clock in the morning, the gray ship was prowling through a fog off the Newfoundland Banks; but there was no sea to speak of, just a gentle swell, and in spite of the stoves, the galley was cold and wet.

  The purser looked first at the stock, which had been simmering in a ten-gallon kettle these twenty-four hours past. “How does she ride?” the baker asked. He was a small man with a pocked face, and the purser nodded at him. Six years ago, in the prehistoric past of peace, the purser had been second cook on a fruit boat to the Islands.

  “If I was Bill,” the baker said, “I would take that little sonovabitch who threw away the carrots and I would put a knowledge of God into him, so help me, I would.”

  “He didn’t mean anything,” the purser said, recalling the wrath of the steward when he discovered that the carrots had gone overboard. For weeks and weeks, ever since Sydney, Australia, where he bought them, the steward had husbanded a crate of carrots. Together with two pounds of raisins and a jar of Miracle Whip, they were to make a salad for the steward’s dinner. Sometimes, it was hard for the purser to understand how a department, like the steward’s could look forward so long and consistently to one dinner.

  He thought about that as he watched Bill, the steward, curse out the messboy. Here they were, so long out from the States that even the memory of the beginning was blurred. From San Pedro on the coast they had gone out to the Hawaiian Islands, from there to Fiji, to New Zealand, to the Solomons, to Iwo, to Australia, and then up the circle to Calcutta; to Ceylon, to Yemen, to Suez—to how many other places? Day in, day out, the stewards put the meals on the table, until, the last day before making port in the States, the order was reversed, and the cooks, bakers, messboys and the others sat down at the table, to be waited on and served and fed. The purser had volunteered to do the cooking, and the carpenter had come on as his second, and a fool of a messboy had thrown out a crate of carrots.

  “It is not,” the steward said, speaking his slow Texas drawl, “that we can’t put on a meal for them. I got three and fifty pounds of filet mignon in the box and there’s plenty of potatoes to fry. But I was counting on the carrots.”

  The purser agreed that a salad was nice.

  “It’s not only that. Sure they can sit down to steak and potatoes. But you eat one meal out of a thousand and you want something special.”

  “Like what?”

  “God knows,” the steward said. “But not Jello and not canned peaches. Last week we had apples—fried apple rings. But the apples are gone. The eggs are gone.”

  “How about onions?” the purser asked. “Because once I ate a Normandy onion soup that was something to dream about.”

  “Plenty of onions,” the steward said without excitement.

  He didn’t particularly like onion soup.

  “This isn’t like what you ate. This is out of the world. I only ate it once.”

  “How do you know you can make it?”

  “I like to cook,” the purser smiled. “I got a feeling for it. As long as you have plenty of onions.”

  But actually, it was a long shot, and he didn’t know whether he could make the onion soup or not. He had a crate of onions out, and he was peeling them when the carpenter came in, put on an apron, and went at the potatoes.

  “Onion soup,” the carpenter said, “is bad gravy with onions floating in it.”

  The purser shook his head. “I come from a people who know food and like food.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You know what my mother, she used to tell me when I was a kid? Eat your vegetables, she used to say, because when you grow up and marry an American girl, you’ll eat boiled vegetables.”

  “What’s wrong with boiled vegetables?” the carpenter wanted to know.

  “Nothing. But food is a mark of civilization. This onion soup is a mark of civilization. In all my life, I ate it only once. That makes me sad.”

  “It wouldn’t made me sad,” the carpenter said.

  When he had finished peeling the onions, the purser went out on deck. They were not doing more than six or seven knots, and the wind was off shore, and the purser wondered whether he could smell home in it. Yet he was still three thousand miles and more from home and a wife and two children, who were in the San Fernando Valley; it was what would happen to him, he thought, to go out of the West Coast and into the East. For a while, he watched the sluggish gray water, until the third engineer came along and said:

  “I hear you’re making an onion soup for the stewards.”

  “So?”

  “I ate good onion soup in France but no place else,” said the third, a small, dry and melancholy man in his late forties, but only to make conversation, leaning on the rail alongside of the purser. In the purser’s home, food was life and life was food, with avocado trees in the front yard and the best paste in all of California, or so he thought and his four brothers and his three sisters and his wife and their wives. The white bread was home-baked and the manicotti had once made a poet sing of it. You sat at a table and life rewarded you for having the temerity to live.

  “This is a Normandy onion soup,” the purser said slowly, apart from the third, born and brought up in the States, but always a stranger to these folk who had no food, only quantity, no love for food, no understanding of food, no relationship to food.

  The third shrugged and spat onto the rush of wind, and the purser went back into the galley. “I only ate it once,” he said to the carpenter, “and it was golden brown, creamy, and the essence of onions came from it, but never a taste or touch of onions. You get to figure you can make a food, if you know how to cook, even if you don’t know just what goes into it.”

  “I was a short-order cook in a diner in Omaha once,” the carpenter said. “I was also cook in a lumber camp for Toohey Brothers back in the old Wobbly days, but what they ate shouldn’t happen to a dog. Where did you learn to cook?”

  The purser sliced onions and remembered that he was second in the huge galley of the old America, and way back in forty, before it properly began, he had shipped on an oiler that later went down on the Murmansk Run. He was first cook, but where had he learned to cook? In a hot, sunny California memory, he watched his mother cook, but the nostalgia of the memory was apart from any curriculum. The onion juice ran over his hands as he brought back the wonder of childhood, adding to it the strange fact of his own children.

  “Slice me about five pounds of bacon, thin,” he said. And then added, “You don’t learn to cook.”

  The cook and the second cook joined the carpenter and the purser. The ship was a condition of perpetual hunger, and even if this was the day of the steward’s department, three meals had to be cooked and served. But a lunch of potato salad and cold cuts and supper of baked macaroni with cheese and ham was recognized and admitted as a bow to the special nature of the day. The top of the long galley stove belonged to the purser and the carpenter, and the cook, a fat, pock-marked mountain of a Greek, and the second cook, yellow-haired and skinny, from southern Oklahoma, both recognized this fact, adopting a deliberate and somewhat mawkish dilettantism. It pleased them that they were strangers in the galley on this day, and having little enough work, what with the cold cuts and the one huge casserole, they snooped around like tourists.

  “Onion soup?” the cook asked.

  “With filet mignon and fried potatoes,” the carpenter added. “You won’t starve.”

  “I don’t see a potato again in this life, I won’t shed no tears,” the second cook said.

  “But onion soup—” the cook said, and then, fearful that he had hurt the purser’s feelings, added, “I got some gallon cans of bouillon if you need it.”

  “Bouillon,” the purser said softly. “Mother of God, bouillon!”

  “You leave him alone,” the carpenter said. “What in hell are you guys doing here anyway? Take your stinking cold cuts into the pantry. Take them to t
he head. Here we are slaving away over a hot stove and you got no appreciation, only an interest like a couple of marks in a summer carnival.”

  He shouldered them out, and the purser selected a frying pan thirty inches in diameter, laid out the bacon on it, and set it to fry. As the bacon began to sizzle and blister, he mentioned to the carpenter:

  “Why do you suppose he ships out as cook?”

  “It’s a living,” the carpenter said. “I’m an old man, but if I was a young feller, I’d learn me to cook. I wouldn’t be no deck hand.”

  The purser hung over the frying pan, guiding the strips of bacon, lifting out each piece as it browned and laying it on a big sheet of Manila he had spread on the table. As the fat in the pan increased, the remaining strips of bacon danced merrily. It was a long and tedious process, but he carried it through until he had a pan of fresh, bubbling lard, not burned and not smoking, and all of the bacon crisp and browned evenly.

  “You going to eat lunch?” the carpenter wanted to know.

  The purser shook his head. For the first time in months, the loneliness, the awful combination of space and time, was falling away. Standing in his shorts, his big, brown, hairy body warmed to the heat of the stove and swayed to the gentle roll of the ship. The onion soup became more than a soup, more and beyond his explaining to anyone.

  When the last of the bacon was finished, the purser added salt to the fat and ground down peppercorns, which he spread through it evenly. He set it on a low light and tried to think of spice. After he had eaten the Normandy onion soup, that single time, he had gone in to the cook and asked her. She was a wizened shred of a woman, with blue eyes as pale as the winter sky.

  “You make it,” she said.

  “But how—how do you spice it?”

  She put her hands on her flat dugs and rocked back and forth, gurgling with laughter. “You go to hell, huh?” she laughed, and then added, “Tu peux m’embrasser quelque part.”

  He went out and told his wife. “That’s a nasty old woman,” his wife had said. “It’s good soup, but I don’t see why you make such a fuss about it.”

  “It’s the most wonderful soup a man ever ate.”

  Now he brooded over the matter, tossed a mental coin finally, took a small sifter, and put a heaping tablespoon of curry powder through it, spreading it evenly over the fat. Then he separated the onions into rings and added them. The mountain of onions fried slowly, the purser perched on a stool and poking at it now and then with a long fork. While he sat there, the carpenter brought him a sandwich, which he munched thoughtfully. He had been sailing for five years now; suppose he came home and found that the war was over? Would he go on sailing? Where do old sailors go? He looked at the carpenter.

  An A.B. came in, a lad of twenty-eight or so, nodded at them and then studied the onions. “You got a lot a fat,” he said appraisingly.

  “I drain it off after a while,” the purser said, “and I let it dry out on the pan.”

  “I hear you’re making onion soup,” the A.B. remarked.

  The purser grinned. “It gets around.”

  The A.B. stayed until the fat was drained off and the onions nursed back on the pan. “I’ll need some bread,” the purser said to the carpenter. “About thirty slices. Cut them about half an inch thick, shape them round with a cake cutter or something, and then sprinkle them over with garlic salt. Pack them up like six-decker sandwiches and let them sit.” The onions were finished now, and the purser let them simmer on a very low flame. Then he crushed the dry bacon with a pestle and put it in with the onions, mixing it slowly.

  “It don’t make sense about the bread,” the carpenter said. “What in hell’s name will you do with it?” Scrunching through the great icebox, he had found two shriveled survivors of the apples they had taken on at Sydney. They hitched up on the table and chewed the apples.

  “That’s the one thing I know,” the purser answered. “There was a slice of toasted bread on the soup, and it was done with the garlic salt, packing it, and letting it soak through. It does it, if the bread is fresh.”

  “A guy as crazy about food as you,” the carpenter said, “he ought to be pretty fat. You’re not fat.”

  “I like good food,” said the purser, “but it doesn’t depend on how much I eat.”

  “If a guy likes dames—”

  “I got to put that mess through a sieve,” the purser sighed. “A ricer wouldn’t be any good.” The steward came in while they were searching through the cupboards and he found them a huge iron cone, threaded through with holes, like a helm out of the Middle Ages, and he stayed to hold it as the purser pounded through the onions and bacon, which emerged as a purée. Two oilers who had heard about the soup joined the carpenter.

  To the purser, one of the oilers said, “I been in Normandy. I never ate onion soup there.”

  The other had an ache behind his left ear that had been bothering him all day, and since the ship carried no pharmacist’s mate, the purser dispensed medicine and sometimes surgery out of three large books. He went to the cabin with the oiler, looked into his ear, looked into the book, and then gave him two aspirin and some sulfa gum to chew. With afternoon, the sun had emerged, and the purser stood on the boat deck for a while, craning his neck to watch them paint and bed down the twenty-millimeter guns. The steward was waiting for him when he returned to the galley. They put the puree into an eight-quart pot and then drew the stock, while the whole galley steamed with the strong smell of twenty pounds of meat, bones and gristle that had thirty hours of cooking behind it.

  When the stock was drawn, the purser mixed it slowly and gently. The second mate joined the oiler, and the carpenter, who was opening cans of peaches for dessert, said, “Why don’t you taste it?”

  “First, the roux.”

  It had become ritualized. A wiper and the first mate added themselves to the crowd, and the steward went to the box and returned with two pounds of butter. Putting it in a pan to melt, the purser began to sift his flour. There was an easiness about them, they had been together so long, but also a tenseness, and the steward could only think, “What a damnfool thing over a pot of soup.” But the wiper said stolidly, “I’d use arrowroot.”

  Nobody laughed. The purser stared at him for a long moment, and the wiper, a dark little man, nodded back solemnly.

  “You got arrowroot?” the purser asked the steward.

  The steward went for the arrowroot. The purser let the butter brown delicately, and then turned it with the arrowroot, bit by bit; using a big wire whip and thicking the roux as he worked. They were silent while the roux cooked, and then, when it was ready, they watched him blend it into the soup. There it was, golden brown, almost eight quarts of it.

  “Taste it,” the steward said.

  “It looks right,” the purser murmured, a curious expression on his face.

  “Go ahead and taste it,” someone else said.

  The purser tasted it, and it wasn’t right, and he thought of the little, dried-up Normandy woman laughing in his face. The others watched him but didn’t ask to taste it themselves. He added pepper and salt and tasted it again. The steward raised his brows inquiringly.

  “Something’s missing,” the purser said slowly. They all felt what he felt now.

  “You’ll get it,” the wiper said. “You only ate it once. You want to remember what it tasted like. Maybe that was a long time ago. Just think about the taste.”

  Now they felt worse than he felt, and there was an element of love as well as sadness as they watched him walk out of the galley onto the deck. “To hell with it, it’s just soup,” the carpenter thought, but he was sad too.

  The purser walked to the after hatch and sat down next to the cook, and for a while the two of them sat silent, watching an ordinary paint over the rust where shrapnel had scored and punctured the rail.

  “The son of a bitch,” the cook said finally, but the purser said nothing at all, and the Greek guessed what it was. “They can somehow pull through on s
teak,” the cook said. “It will be tough, but they’ll pull through.”

  “It’s not that. I feel like I’m coming home empty. It’s a crazy way to feel, but that’s what I feel.”

  “I was on a C3,” the cook said, “and I had a second who was a Swiss, and he put nutmeg into every soup he made.”

  “Nutmeg?”

  “Nutmeg,” the cook said. “Me, I make an onion soup from old gravy. I fry some onions and let them swim. To hell with it—it’s onion soup.”

  “You ever put nutmeg in soup?” the purser asked.

  “I beat the ass off that damnfool Swiss once I found out.”

  “You got any nutmeg?” the purser asked.

  “I got a bag of nuts somewhere.”

  “Let’s try it,” the purser said.

  They went inside, and the cook found the nutmegs. The purser took half a ladle of soup, and the cook scraped the nutmeg into it. Then the purser tasted it. “A little more,” he said. He tasted it again, and it was right, like no other soup the world had seen, and then he let the carpenter and the cook taste it, while he thought about the way the old Normandy woman had laughed. The steward wanted to taste it, and so did the wiper and some of the others, but the purser shook his head.

  “If any’s left over,” he told them. “I got to get supper.” And he put the garlic bread into the oven to dry out slowly.

  That night, the purse stood on deck, arms on the rail, and watched a lighthouse blinking, on and off, on and off. He felt warm and close to a lot of people, and he wanted to cry because he was home and he’d say good-by to them and never see them again. There were twenty-two people in the steward’s department, and when the meal was over, one by one they came into the galley where he was washing dishes, and they shook his hand and each of them said something about the soup.

  Then the old man sent down for a plate of the soup. The old man was a Dane and fussy about his food and always cursing out the cook, but he sent back for a second plate of soup. He wanted to know how it was made.

  “Tell him to go jump in the drink,” the carpenter had said.