The Captain’s Dinner was strange. We were off the coast of Lower California. The water was so calm that we could hear flying fish slap against it. We ate at a long table out on deck, under an awning between us and the enormous stars.
The Captain looked well in his white uniform, and smiled almost warmly at us all, probably thanking God that most of us would leave him in a few days. The waiters were excited, the way the Filipino boys used to be at boarding school when there was a Christmas party, and the table looked like something from a Renaissance painting.
There were galantines and aspics down the center, with ripe grapes brought from Italy and stranger fruits from all the ports we’d touched, and crowning everything two stuffed pheasants in their dulled but still dashing feathers. There were wineglasses on stems, and little printed menus, proof that this masterpiece of a meal was known about in Rome, long since.
We ate and drank and heard our own suddenly friendly voices over the dark waters. The waiters glided deftly, perhaps dreaming that they served at Bifli’s instead of on this fifth-rate freighter, and we drank Asti Spumanti, undated but delightful.
And finally, while we clapped, the chef stood before us, bowing in the light from the narrow stairs. He wore his high bonnet and whites, and a long-tailed morning coat, and looked like a drawing by Ludwig Bemelmans, with oblique sadness in his pasty outlines.
There was a silence after our applause. He turned nervously toward the light, and breathed not at all. We heard shufflings and bumps. Then, up through the twisting white closeness of the stairway, borne on the backs and arms of three awestruck kitchen boys, rose something almost too strange to talk about.
The chef stood back, bowing, discreetly wiping the sweat from his white face. The Captain applauded. We all clapped, and even cheered. The three boys set the thing on a special table.
It was a replica, about as long as a man’s coffin, of the cathedral at Milano. It was made in white and pink sugar. There was a light inside, of course, and it glowed there on the deck of the little ship, trembling in every flying buttress with the Mexican ground swell, pure and ridiculous; and something about it shamed me.
It was a little dusty. It had undoubtedly been mended, after mighty storms, in the dim galleys of a hundred ships, better but never worse than this. It was like a flag flying for the chef, a bulwark all in spun sugar against the breath of corruption. It was his masterpiece, made years ago in some famous kitchen, and he showed it to us now with dignity.
—Hemet, 1942