Departure (6 page)

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 steak,” 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.

It was funny, the purser thought, because they were as hard-bitten a group of men on the ship as he had ever known, hard men who were all knotted up with work and too many long trips and too many torpedoes and too many dive bombers and the closeness of a piece of iron where they had been living almost forever. It was funny, he thought.

And he thought of how he would tell his wife about it, and she would not see anything in a pot of onion soup to make all this fuss about. He thought about his wife easily and pleasantly now, and he kept on thinking about her as the blinking light faded into the distance.

An Epitaph for Sidney

W
E THOUGHT AT
first that an epitaph for Sidney should be more than a few words, and I and some of the others who had known him well set out to collate what information we had; but in the end we did not use the material, and it was handed over to me. From what we have, you will be able to see why we were able to write an epitaph for Sidney in a line.

Some of us knew Sidney Greenspan when we were very young. He was born in the year 1915 in Washington Heights, and he grew up there and went to Public School 46, and then he went to De Witt Clinton High School, and then he went to City College—but he didn't finish at City College. He was a thin, spindle-legged little boy, and he never really achieved height or any sort of muscular efficiency, and since he read a lot and studied a good deal afterwards, he came by myopia early, and it remained with him.

He came from a family of very poor Jews, one of five children, with a thin, tired mother and a father who worked at a sewing machine in one sweatshop and then another; actually, he didn't have to work in sweatshops; he could have worked in union shops, as Sidney told him and pleaded with him, but he had been fifteen months out of work in the long strike during the twenties, and that had taken the starch and the heart out of him and turned him into a piece of putty. The result was that he worked ten and twelve hours a day in sweatshops, always thinking that if a strike came, it would leave him alone. Sidney's mother, who was like a shadow moving here and there, cooking and cleaning, but always like a shadow, gave to the children and never asked anything in return, not even love, until she died in 1932. Sidney had just entered college when she died. In a letter to a friend of his, he wrote “… I don't feel pity or sorrow, only anger.…” Mr. Greenspan lived on and shriveled up; he went on with his work motions, like an old clock that was winding out, ever more slowly.

Of Sidney's brothers and sisters, only two grew to maturity. One fell under a truck at the age of seven, a little boy named Lester, Celia, the elder sister, died of a mastoid. Adrian and Fannie are still alive; Adrian became a schoolteacher, and the old man, Mr. Greenspan, was most proud of him. Fannie married a fur worker; she was two years younger than Sidney, and when she was a little girl he adored her.

II

Even in this brief outline, there is enough to indicate that Sidney Greenspan was not of the stuff of which heroes are made, at least in the conception of heroes which is most popular in America today. The tenement district in which he lived and grew was not a slum, but very close to a slum; the fact that he was a small, thin boy gave his life reasonable hazard, in the way of Jew-baiting and the run of fights. He was often afraid, and there was much and subtle variation in the types of fear; he feared death and being beaten up and going hungry and not passing exams, but one fear and another was woven into the fabric of his life and accepted, just as he accepted the fact of work from the age of eleven, first as a delivery boy, then with a newspaper route, then as a canvasser for the local Tammany Club, then as a hack political street-corner speaker at the age of sixteen. His father went around with a bright hope burning in his heart that Sidney would study law, but in the first year at City College, Sidney's jaw was fractured in a student demonstration, and amid reacting to the pain of his son's bruised body, his father realized that the boy was a radical and came to accept the fact that he would not be a lawyer, not an alderman, nor even an assemblyman, not even a schoolteacher.

But fear did not make Sidney a radical. Such cloth is woven of other stuff, and for Sidney there was a world lost that should not have been lost. Some are made or shaped or fashioned to see all the parts of the whole, not one direction or one street or one narrow alley, but all the roads that lead on; and it was for a part of that horizon that Sidney stayed with the class that made him. If he had accepted, his epitaph could have been more easily written, but he didn't accept—he had to understand. In one way, there was a tremendous health and vitality in his small, skinny body, an identification with life that was more than matched chromosomes or cell clinging to cell. Death gives the lie to life, refutes it, and all the misshapen things that Sidney saw were part of that death. And he walked into life with his head up; vitality is a manner of saying other things. The vitality of Sidney made him a prow rather than a rudder.

“I told him,” Mr. Greenspan said long afterwards to one of us who knew Sidney, “that it was no good. He would get in trouble, he should try to be a good, hard worker and keep out of trouble.”

But Sidney didn't look for trouble. As a boy, he hardly ever won a fight; he wasn't a tough kid, and he stayed away from fights whenever he could. He always had a job after school, and even to go to a free college like C.C.N.Y. he had to work during the summers. Two summers he worked at Lang's Wholesale Grocery Warehouse downtown on Hudson Street, until he became involved with attempts to organize it and was fired. And then he had a job one summer at Coney Island, handling props for a magician's show. But the point is that he never looked for trouble, and you could see that just by looking at him.

He didn't look any different at eighteen than he did at twenty-five, about five feet seven inches in height, a hundred and thirty-two or -three pounds, with sloping shoulders, a prominent nose, and thin brown hair. His brown eyes were reflective and gentle, giving an impression of sympathetic softness; you were surprised to find something hard and absolutely unyielding underneath; no matter how long you knew Sidney you were always surprised at that.

When he was eighteen years old, a freshman at City College, he met Jane Albertson and fell in love with her, in spite of such obvious obstacles as both her parents having a little money and being descended from what they call “old American stock,” and her being an inch taller than he was. And the strange part of it was that after the usual initial fumbling and antagonism she fell in love with him, something nobody understood except those of us who knew Sidney. The first time he brought her home with him, to the same, tiny apartment where the Greenspans had always lived, the old man was still grieving over his wife, with a kind of awful, dumb-animal suffering. The apartment was dirty and messy; Fannie tried to keep house, but it was not the kind of thing she was good at, and Adrian was already married. Janie walked in with the air of a person who had spent most of her life in such places, and she kissed the old man. The old man began to cry, and Janie remembers that Sidney was the most embarrassed one there, and when she said she would stay for supper, he put on his jacket and ran down to buy things in the delicatessen. But after that, Janie and the old man were like a daughter and father.

The way they fell in love and the way they went together all the time Sidney was in college was a little curious, for time was something Sidney never had much of. He clerked in a dry goods store after school; he was active in the student movement; and then in 1934 he joined the Young Communist League. But, somehow, he and Janie were closer and closer. She joined the YCL too, and had some terrible fights with her people at home; and then, in 1935, they were quietly married at City Hall, something they kept a secret for almost four years.

Only a few of us, who knew Sidney quite well, also knew about the marriage. It was in 1934 that I first met Sidney, and I was with him when his head was cracked by a nightstick in the big downtown demonstration, and I got him home then and stayed with him while the doctor came and put seven stitches in his scalp. It was then that Mr. Greenspan, almost tearfully, raised the question:

“Why, why should he have to mix up in such trouble?”

Lying there, Sidney said, “Please, Poppa, don't worry about it.”

“A good boy, a boy who works as hard as he does.”

“Poppa, I don't look for trouble. You think I like to get cracked over the head?”

“I don't know what to think,” Mr. Greenspan said. “Wherever you look, those Communists make trouble. They got nothing else to do except to make trouble.”

“This is such a good world, you want me to accept it?” Sidney said.

He changed after that; they say that no scar is skin deep. When you tell it this way, looking back, with all of us a good deal older, and in retrospect, none of us ever having been very young, it doesn't seem that there was so much in Sidney's life; there is no ABC formula to put your finger on to explain Sidney. He said to me once, I think when he was nineteen years old, “Do you know, I'm a professional revolutionary”—as if it had only occurred to him that moment; but as a matter of fact, it was so, and every other action he engaged in was on the periphery. In those days—it seems a thousand years ago, five histories ago—it seemed that the world we lived in could not go on; and indeed that world is dead today, washed out in the blood of thirty million souls, even if the fight is not over. But someone like Sidney belongs to that world; when there is a perspective, sometime in the future, the long, long future, when the fighting is over, when the guns no longer thunder, when the scars left by the atom bombs have healed, when the gray ships lie peacefully on the ocean bottoms, then there will be a whole understanding of Sidney, of what he was and what went into the making of him. Then, perhaps, they will be able to analyze the trivia as well as the bigger things. They will know what the expression on Sidney's face meant when he heard his father say once, speaking of his not long dead mother. “All she wanted was two weeks in the mountains, with a little grass and some birds, maybe, but she never got that.”