Let Me Finish (17 page)

Not to worry. In time, I think, these young topers will find their way back to the martini, to the delectable real thing, and become more fashionable than they ever imagined. In the summer of 1939, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at Hyde Park—it was a few weeks before the Second World War began—and as twilight fell F.D.R. said, "My mother does not approve of cocktails and thinks you should have a cup of tea." The King said, "Neither does my mother." Then they had a couple of rounds of martinis.

I myself might have had a martini that same evening, at my mother and stepfather's house in Maine, though at eighteen—almost nineteen—I was still young enough to prefer something sweeter, like the yummy, Cointreau-laced Sidecar. The martini meant more, I knew that much, and soon thereafter, at college, I could order one or mix one with aplomb. As Ogden Nash put it, in "A Drink with Something in It":

 

There is something about a martini,
A tingle remarkably pleasant;
A yellow, a mellow martini;
I wish I had one at present.
There is something about a martini
Ere the dining and dancing begin,
And to tell you the truth,
It is not the vermouth—
I think that perhaps it's the gin.

 

In John O'Hara's 1934 novel,
Appointment in Samarra,
the doomed hero, Julian English, and his wife, Caroline, observe Christmas with his parents, as usual. They live in the Pennsylvania coal town of Gibbsville, but the Englishes are quality, and before their festive dinner Julian's father, Dr. William English, mixes and serves up midday martinis; then they have seconds.

In the 1940 classic movie comedy
The Philadelphia Story,
the reliable character actor John Halliday plays Katharine Hepburn's reprobate father, who has returned home unexpectedly on the eve of her wedding. Standing on a terrace in the early evening, he mixes and pours a dry martini for himself and his deceived but accepting wife (Mary Nash) while at the same time he quietly demolishes his
daughter's scorn for him and some of her abiding hauteur. It's the central scene of the ravishing flick, since it begins Tracy Lord's turnabout from chilly prig Main Line heiress to passably human Main Line heiress, and the martini is the telling ritual: the presentation of sophistication's Host. Hepburn had played the same part in the Broadway version of the Philip Barry play, a year before, which also required that martini to be mixed and poured before our eyes. Sitting in the dark at both versions, I was entranced by the dialogue—only Philip Barry could have a seducer-dad convincingly instruct his daughter in morals—but at the same time made certain that the martini was made right: a slosh of gin, a little vermouth, and a gentle stirring in the pitcher before the pouring and the first sips. Yes, O.K., my martini-unconscious murmured, but next time maybe more ice, Seth.

This is not a joke. Barry's stage business with the bottles and the silver stirring spoon in one moment does away with a tiresome block of explanation about the Lords: he's run off with a nightclub singer and she's been betrayed, but they have shared an evening martini together before this—for all their marriage, in fact—and soon they'll be feeling much better. In the movie, which was directed by George Cukor, the afternoon loses its light as the drink is made and the talk sustained, and the whole tone of the drama shifts. Everyone is dressed for the coming party, and the martini begins the renewing complications. Sitting in the theatre, we're lit up a little, too, and ready for all that comes next—the dance, the scene by the pool—because the playwright has begun things right.

Cocktails at Hyde Park or on Philadelphia's Main Line sound aristocratic, but the Second World War changed our ways. In the Pacific, where I was stationed, a couple of Navy fighter pilots told me a dumb story they'd heard in training, about the tiny survival kit that was handed out to flight-school graduates headed for carrier duty. "Open Only in Extreme Emergency," it said—which seemed to be the case of a pilot north of Midway whose Grumman quit cold a hundred miles away from his flattop. After ditching, he climbed into his inflatable raft, regarded the empty horizon that encircled him, and opened the kit. Inside was a tiny shaker and a glass, a stirring straw, a thimbleful of gin, and an eyedropper's worth of vermouth. He mixed and stirred, and was raising the mini-cocktail to his lips when he became aware that vessels had appeared from every quarter of the Pacific and were making toward him at top speed. The first to arrive, a torpedo boat, roared up, and its commanding officer, shouting through his megaphone, called, "
That's
not the right way to make a dry martini!"

Dryness was all, dryness was the main debate, and through the peacetime nineteen-forties and fifties we new suburbanites tilted the Noilly Prat bottle with increasing parsimony, as the martini recipe went up from three parts gin and one part dry vermouth to four and five to one, halted briefly at six to one, and rose again from there. The late George Plimpton once reminded me about the Montgomery—a fifteen-to-one martini named after the British Field Marshal, who was said never to go into battle with less than these odds in his favor. What was happening, of
course, was an improvement in the quality of everyday gin. The Frankenstein's-laboratory taste of Prohibition gin no longer needed a sweetener to hide its awfulness: just a few drops of Tribuno or Martini & Rossi Extra Dry would suffice to soften the ginny juniper bite.

Preciousness almost engulfed us, back then. Tiffany's produced a tiny silver oil can, meant to dispense vermouth. Serious debates were mounted about the cool, urban superiority of the Gibson—a martini with an onion in it—or the classicism of the traditional olive. Travellers came home from London or Paris with funny stories about the ghastly martinis they'd been given in the Garrick Club or at the Hotel Regina bar. And, in a stuffy little volume called "The Hour," the historian and
Harper's
columnist Bernard De Voto wrote, "You can no more keep a martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there. The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth and one of the shortest."

We appreciated our martinis, and drank them before lunch and before dinner. I recall an inviting midtown restaurant called Cherio's, where the lunchtime martini came in chalice-sized glasses. Then we went back to work. "Those noontime cocktails just astound me," a young woman colleague of mine said recently. "I don't know how you did it." Neither do I, anymore. My stepfather, E. B. White, sometimes took a dry Manhattan at lunch, but his evening martini was a boon forever. Even when he'd gotten into his seventies and early eighties, I can remember his greeting me and my family at the Bangor airport late on a
summer afternoon and handing me the keys to the car for the fifty-mile drive back to the coast. Sitting up front beside me, he'd reach for his little picnic basket, which contained a packet of Bremner Wafers, some Brie or Gouda and a knife, and the restorative thermos of martinis.

At home, my vermouth mantra became "a little less than the absolute minimum," but I began to see that coldness, not dryness, was the criterion. I tried the new upscale gins—Beefeater's and the rest—but found them soft around the edges and went back to my everyday Gordon's. In time, my wife and I shifted from gin to vodka, which was less argumentative. At dinners and parties, I knew all my guests' preferences: the sister-in-law who wanted an "upside-down martini"—a cautious four parts vermouth to one of gin—and a delightful neighbor who liked her martinis so much that when I came around to get whiskey or brandy orders after dinner she dared not speak their name. "Well, maybe just a little gin on some ice for me," she whispered. "With a dab of vermouth on top."

We drank a lot, we loved to drink, and some of us did not survive it. Back in college, the mother of a girl I knew would sometimes fix herself a silver shaker of martinis at lunchtime and head back upstairs to bed. "Good night," she'd say. "Lovely to see you." I met entire families, two or three generations, who seemed bent on destroying themselves with booze. John Cheever, the Boccaccio of mid-century America, wrote all this in sad and thrilling detail. What seems strange now about celebrated stories of his like "The Country Husband," "The Sorrows of Gin," and "The Swimmer" is how rarely the martini is mentioned,
and how often it's just called gin. Alcohol was central to this landscape, its great descending river.

 

It's my theory—a guess, rather—that martini drinking skipped a generation after Vietnam and marijuana came along. Many thousands of earlier suburban children, admitted to the dinner table or watching their parents' parties from the next room, saw and heard the downside of the ritual—the raised voices and lowered control—and vowed to abandon the cocktail hour when they grew up. Some of them still blame martinis for their parents' divorces. Not until their children arrived and came of age did the slim glass and the delectable lift of the drink reassert itself, and carry us back to the beginning of this story.

I still have a drink each evening, but more often now it's Scotch. When guests come to dinner, there are always one or two to whom I automatically offer Pellegrino or a Coke: their drinking days are behind them. Others ask for water or wait for a single glass of wine with the meal. But if there's a friend tonight with the old predilection, I'll mix up a martini for the two of us, in the way we like it, filling a small glass pitcher with ice cubes that I've cracked into quarters with my little pincers. Don't smash or shatter the ice: it'll become watery in a moment. Put three or four more cracked cubes into our glasses, to begin the chill. Put the gin or the vodka into the pitcher, then wet the neck of the vermouth bottle with a quickly amputated trickle. Stir the martini vigorously but without sloshing. When the side of the pitcher is misted like a January windowpane pour the drink into the glasses. Don't allow any of the ice
in the pitcher to join the awaiting, unmelted ice in the glass. (My friend likes his straight up, so I'll throw away the ice in his glass. But I save it in my own, because a martini on the rocks stays cold longer, and I've avoided the lukewarm fourth or fifth sip from the purer potion.) Now stir the drink inside the iced glass, just once around. Squeeze the lemon peel across the surface—you've already pared it, from a fat, bright new lemon—and then run the peel, skin-side down, around the rim of the glass before you drop it in. Serve. Smile.

I
N
midsummer of 1942, a month after I graduated from Harvard, I got drafted and sent to Atlantic City for basic training. As a private in the Air Force (it was a branch of the Army back then), I roomed with four other similarly traumatized young men in a blacked-out oceanside suite at the Ritz Hotel, which had been co-opted as a barracks. Here, for three hot summer weeks, we memorized the Articles of War and learned how to stand at attention, how to salute, and, through training films, how to recognize the Japanese "Betty" bomber, the German ME-109 fighter, and the impartial, skulking gonococcus, all at a glance. We also learned how to march. At six in the morning, with the sun gleaming off the sea and our moving shadows lying long across the boardwalk, we marched from the Ritz down to a mess hall in another hotel, fell out and ate, fell in and marched back. Later that morning we fell out and formed up again, and, accompanied by the blocky dozens of other
platoons, marched three miles up the boardwalk (tromp-tromp, sing out, "Onetwo!") to a dusty parking lot, where we did jumping jacks and other calisthenics. Then we fell in and marched sweatily back three miles for chow at the same mess hall. With the country newly at war, no rifles or sidearms or weapons training had yet come our way, but, boy, could we march.

Late in August, one of many hundreds of rumors came true when we packed up and climbed aboard a troop train and began a journey to someplace—no one told us where. Eventually, we would be dropped off, car by car, at unmarked sidings close to the forts or fields where we would begin our technical training. We didn't know anything, not even which side would win this war. All of Europe still belonged to the Nazis, and the early news from a spot called Guadalcanal was grim.

Days on end, stuffed into ancient, sooty Pullman cars, we rolled and clacked westward, while we dozed, played cards, talked, laughed, got depressed, wrote letters, and read endlessly. Unlike in the G.I. movies made about this time, no one sang. I had brought the Modern Library edition of
The Brothers Karamazov
with me, and had chugged along well into the Grand Inquisitor chapter, when a broken drinking fountain interrupted my studies, inundating a heap of blue barracks bags, including mine, in which I had stashed the gloomy Bros. for the moment. At night, we bunked three to a section, taking turns in the upper berth (a delicious single) or squalidly doubling up, head to foot, in the lower. I still recall waking up in the middle of my
first night and slowly comprehending that I was staring at the pale toes of Private Pete Hoffman, a fireman from Jersey City.

On our third day, I drew K.P.—the hated kitchen fatigue, but this time a welcome break in the dull, mysterious journey. In a converted mail car, we served up some kind of stew from big galvanized-metal barrels, ladling it into the mess kits of our fellow G.I.s, who complained unimaginatively but ate it all up, every scrap. We K.P.s worked late that night, scrubbing away at the massive pots and then sweeping and mopping the ridged, swaying floor. It was after eleven when the mess sergeant said we were done, and then someone rolled back the wide, boxcar-style doors, and the warm night air streamed in around us. With a couple of my companions, I sat down and lit a cigarette and watched Indiana slowly roll away under my dangling, booted feet. We talked a little, I think, and soon the rumble and creak of our car, the pleasing slither of wheels, and the sidewise-moving dark silhouettes of trees silenced us, yet no one got up and headed off to bed. We had a low moon for company, and the smell of fields and the coolness of the occasional stream or river we passed over (with accompanying bridge-rumble) and the smoothly presented and taken-away details of each small town—a silent station and an empty platform, a light on in somebody's upstairs bedroom, a Purina Chow billboard next to a street lamp, more trees—were hypnotic and lulling. Dozens of trains, it came to me, were at that moment carrying thousands of men like me to someplace new and strange, and eventually to the
war itself, but just then, for the first time, I didn't mind at all. I had become a soldier.