The Gastronomical Me by M.F.K. Fisher

Author:M.F.K. Fisher [M.F.K. Fisher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781911547006
Publisher: Daunt Books
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sea Change

1935

I

About three and a half years later, I think, in 1935 or 1936, I went back to France with Chexbres and his mother. The whole thing seems so remote now that I cannot say what was sea change and what had already happened on land. I know that I had been in love with Chexbres for three years or so.

I was keeping quiet about it; I liked him, and I liked his first wife who had recently married again, and I was profoundly attached to Al. Even while I hurried to New York for such an odd jaunt, with Al’s apparently hearty approval, I was making plans for the next years with him, the rest of my life with him.

I was full of resolutions never to be caught in the whirlpool of being a ‘faculty wife’, and was planning to adopt several children, raise goats, not feed more than twenty hungry students a week with my exciting stews and broths; that is to say, I was a typical young faculty wife. A few more years, and I’d have been wearing brown-satin afternoon dresses and wearily eating marshmallow salads at committee luncheons with the best of them.

Instead, I stepped aboard the Hansa, one ice-heavy February midnight.

The Hansa was a tidy, plump little ship. There was something comfortable about her, and at the same time subtly coarse and vulgar, like a motherly barmaid married to a duke in an English novel.

Several things happened to me aboard her that I have often wanted to write about, but I never have and perhaps never will because I feel very strongly about prejudicing people. These things were about Germans, not the kind good Germans who cared for us, but evil men and women. Before the war I did not want to rouse distrust, and have the good judged by the evil ones … and in wartime there is enough hatred, both real and imaginary, without my adding to it.

There was indeed too much ugliness on that pretty little ship. It was all a part of what is happening now in the world, and has always happened, and always will happen while men stunt their souls.

Fortunately it did not touch many people then. Chexbres’ mother did not know about it, nor would she have recognised it if it had reared and hissed at her, so excited was she to be once more pointed towards the Paris of fifty years before, when she studied in Chaplin’s atelier and her homesick father, wordless and bewildered, fished with the other old men along the quais.

Yet, it is better, I think, to forget the bad things on that ship. There were many good ones, and funny too … like the concert grand piano in the Ladies’ Salon, painted a rich creamy pink (with mother-of-pearl keys), so that it looked like a monstrous raspberry in the pistachio mousse décor. Or like my attitude towards life during the first two days of the voyage, when I spent much of the time beating my breast and being Good, Noble and High-minded.

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