[9/19/2011] Perelman Tonight: Putting on the feedbag -- Part 2 of "The Wild Blue Yonder" (Chapter 3 of "The Swiss Family Perelman") (continued)

"The barrage of vittles that bombarded the President Cleveland's passengers on her sixth Pacific crossing was indescribable; the closest analogy I can offer is the Homeric fodder the Hoosiers were wont to stow away in Indiana at the turn of the century, as described by George Ade in his immortal 'Fable of the Waistband That Was Taut Up Till the Moment It Gave Way.' The chief steward apparently felt that unless every man jack of us was carried groaning with heartburn from the table, mutiny would sweep the ship."

-- from tonight's installment of "The Wild Blue Yonder"

The Swiss Family Pearlman
Chapter 3, "The Wild Blue Yonder,"
Part 2 of 3

The décor of the President Cleveland had little in common with that of the ocean greyhounds we remembered from the early Thirties, nor, indeed, with any recognizable nautical tradition. Industrial designers and interior decorators had blown their tops, investing her public rooms with a profusion of monel metal, formica and glass plastics, and splashy murals depicting generously endowed nereids sporting among the billows with dolphins. Through those refined and ruthlessly air-conditioned precincts moved phalanxes of cat-footed waiters dedicated to anticipating your every wish. It was overpoweringly functional and as hygienic as a brain clinic, but every so often you felt a catch in your throat at the memory of those antebellum French cabin boats, with their matchless bouquet of lavabo, spilt Pinard, hot salt water, and garlic.

Once the napkin was furled under the jowls and you started tucking in the groceries, though, nostalgia died like a dog. The barrage of vittles that bombarded the President Cleveland's passengers on her sixth Pacific crossing was indescribable; the closest analogy I can offer is the Homeric fodder the Hoosiers were wont to stow away in Indiana at the turn of the century, as described by George Ade in his immortal "Fable of the Waistband That Was Taut Up Till the Moment It Gave Way."

The chief steward apparently felt that unless every man jack of us was carried groaning with heartburn from the table, mutiny would sweep the ship. To this end he plied us at each meal with eighteen or twenty recherché appetizers like caviar, herring filets, soused mackerel, North Sea sprats, cracked crab, sardellen, and Philadelphia head cheese; an array of soups, broths, and bisques distilled from every crustacean, fowl, and quadruped ever classified by Buffon; fish snared the width and breadth of the Seven Seas; eggs and rarebits innumerable; entrées employing the flesh not only of common edible animals but of bears, wolves, stags, boars, hartebeests, springboks, and wapiti; cold buffets and salads of endless variety and ingenuity; and sweetmeats, savories, and cheeses that made the head ring with their succulence and scope.

Personally, I am an ascetic type boy; just give me a soupçon of pâté de foie gras, a cup of vichyssoise, a filet of Dover sole, a small entrecote about the size of a longshoreman's hand flanked by potatoes Anna and hothouse peas, a galantine of capon in spiced jelly, a mixed green salad, a pot de crème au chocolat, a few fragments of Pont l'Évêque, and a touch of Brazilian coffee -- give me little else, I repeat, and I can curl up on the bare floor with my tartan wrapped around me. But I do think there is no more appalling sight than people stuffing themselves indiscriminately, and there were times in that dining saloon, particularly after I had finished eating, when the gluttony of my neighbors forced me to avert my eyes.

One of the worst offenders, though it costs me an effort to confess it, was my own good lady, who was frequently to be observed recumbent in a deck-chair following these debauches, peepers as heavy-lidded as a constrictor who has just engorged a chicken. I would chide her lightly, throwing in joking allusions to Kate Smith and the three-toed sloth, but no entreaty could dissipate her lethargy. As a result, I was invariably forced to interrupt work I should have been doing, such as reading aloud extracts from the Kamasutra to an inconsolable divorcee behind a lifeboat, and go below to supervise the children's lessons.

Our initial sessions, truthfully, were none too rewarding. The bulk of the problems in their arithmetic dealt with an unattractive dullard named Farmer Brown who had cut up his lower forty into rhomboids or isosceles triangles and was unable to compute the square of the hypotenuse. After breaking my nails on his dilemma, I explained to the cubs that if, instead of mousing around with Euclid, Brown would set out a little marijuana in his fields, he could check both erosion and foreclosure.

Rather than rehash poppycock of no conceivable use in Southeast Asia, I got down to brass tacks. With the aid of a blanket and Nick Scarne's admirable treatise on dice, I gave the young a bit of instruction in calculating odds, fading, and supplicating the bones. I also taught them a few simple methods of smuggling contraband past customs officials, the technique of haggling with pedicab drivers and rickshaw men, and the minimum provocation needed to kick or cuif one's native boys.

We concluded with several rudimentary exercises in black market manipulation, at which they showed an adroitness and chicanery that would have shamed a weasel. I could not help but feel a glow of fatherly pride subsequently in Hong Kong when I met them skulking along Ice House Street, pockets stuffed with rupees, Straits dollars, and Indonesian guilders, for I knew that at last my drudgery had borne fruit.


TOMORROW NIGHT IN PART 3 OF "THE WILD BLUE YONDER": Hawaii to Hong Kong


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