The Nail and the Oracle (7 page)

He asked again, “Who’s this for?”

“Anyone who likes to eat this way.”

“Now who would that be?” asked Macleish, honestly perplexed.

“I might say anyone who knows the difference between eating and dining.” She laughed at him suddenly. He was walleyed as a new calf seeing his first bull. “Or anybody that might like to learn.”

He wet his lips. “Me?”

She laughed at him again. “You’re right welcome, Mr. Macleish.” Then, in tones of real apology, “It’s got to cost a little more, though, and take a while to fix.”

“Oh that’s all right,” he said quickly, his eyes on the gleaming table. He picked up a salad fork between his fingertips and carefully set it down again. “You’re goin’ to have to break trail for me through all this.”

She laughed again and told him to set right down. She seemed to think he was no end funny, and he imagined he was; but there’s ways and ways of getting laughed at, and he didn’t mind her way. He sat down, careful not to bump anything, and she whisked away the second place setting and left with it.

She was back in a moment with a dish, a long narrow oval of cut glass in which were arranged six celery stalks and a mound of what looked like olives only they were shiny black. She set it down and gently removed the napkin from under his chin and spread it on his lap, while he sat rigidly with his big scrubbed hard-work hands hidden under the edge of the table. “I ‘spect some folks think I’m addled in the head,” she chattered, “but I always say that good manners are
the only real difference between the men and the beasts. I don’t reckon there’s another table like this this side of San Diego, not till you reach St. Louis. Don’t just stare at those olives, boy—eat ’em! … It just does me good to have someone
dine
instead of feed. Or learn it,” she added quickly and kindly. “Here.” And from under her arm she took a great big card and laid it before him.

MENU
, it announced itself in block type at the top. All the rest was in script—flowery curly Spencerian script, so neat and straight and pretty that he just wagged his head in amazement over it. He could make out every single letter—but not one of the words.

“It’s in French,” she explained. “All real high-toned menus in real high-toned places are written in French. This one’s from the Hotel Metropole in San Francisco. I had my honeymoon there with Mister Appleton.” She smiled a little more brightly, even, than usual, and Macleish had the vague feeling that something hurt her. “I put that menu away and kep’ it for twelve years, and I said to myself that someday I’d serve up that dinner again in a place of my own, and now I do. These,” she explained, “are the appetizers, and this is the soup. Down here is fish and then meat. Here and here are vegetables and potatoes and all that, and then dessert and so on.”

“Appetizers?”

“They hone up your appetite. Make you hungry.”

He wagged his head again at the idea of folks needing to be made hungry at dinnertime. He squinted at the card and said, “Chat. Chat.”

“Chateaubriand,” she read out. “You cook beef in wine.”

“Why?”

She laughed. “Ask yourself that when you’ve tasted it.”

He forlornly handed her back the card. “I better leave all this to you, Miz Appleton. You just bring it on and tell me what to do.”

She left him munching on a stalk of celery. Each stick was packed full of a gooey, blue-y stuff that tasted like cheese and, as Miz Appleton explained to him when she came back to pour him a glass of very dry sherry,
was
cheese. He inhaled the whole dishful and drank the wine at a gulp, and sat there with his stomach growling for more.

So Younger Macleish ate a fragrant thin soup with crisp tiny fried cubes of bread afloat in it, some tender flakes of trout meat, four
popovers, five salted breadsticks and two rolls; another dish of stuffed celery and olives, three helpings of the Chateaubriand and all the fixings that went with it; and four pieces of lemon meringue pie you could have sneezed off the plate it was so light. He drank white wine and red wine, sharp and thin, and at the end, in a third glass, a heavy red port that his tongue roots couldn’t believe. Nuts came with this, and a silver thing to crack them with, and a little bitty doll’s house sort of cup of coffee. Somewhere along the line he had lost the conviction that genteel folk didn’t know anything about eating, the helpings seemed so small; because they kept coming and coming, until at last he had to sneak a quick pull on his cinches and let his belt out a notch, silently commanding his liver to move over and make more room. Packed with well-being until it showed on his face in a sheen of sweat, he pressed limply at a nut in the nutcracker and wondered if Mr. Appleton was still alive or had died happy of eating.

“Mr. Appleton was killed on the way back,” said the little lady when she brought more coffee, smiling that brighter-than-usual smile. “The trace chain broke. He threw me clear but he went over with the horses. The only thing I can’t give you,” she went on rapidly, “is a brandy. At the Metropole you’ll see the gentlemen sitting around after their dinner smoking their fine Havana see-gars, and there’ll be brandy. Just a little drop of it in the bottom of a big glass like a flower vase. That’s so they can smell it better. Or sometimes they’ll call for a shot-glass too and pour in a little brandy and dip the end of their see-gar into it. Or put a drop or two right into their coffee. I do wish I had a bit of fine old brandy for you, so you’d know how it is. They always used to call for the oldest brandy, because that’s best.”

Killed on the way back
, Macleish silently repeated to himself. That would be from the honeymoon. He said, “It’s all right about the brandy, Miz Appleton. I doubt I’d git a drop of anything all the way down. Not till tomorrow noon or so anyhow.”

“Well, I wish you had it all the same. How do you feel?”

“Miz Appleton,” he said with all his heart, “I ain’t lived such a life that I deserved all this.”

“I think you have,” she told him. “I think you will. You’re a nice young man, Mr. Macleish.”

He felt his ears getting hot again and stood up and batted his way through the red and blue beads and got clear of the alcove. Either he had to escape from all this goodness or he had to take a walk and shake down this dinner so he’d be able to lie down without spilling. He thanked her again and left her beaming after him, with her quick small hands folded together under her apron.

He’d already been past the livery and the mercantile, so he naturally ambled the other way. The town had its quota of bars, and a school right in town, and a church. Then there was a bank and a long row of dwellings and what do you know, a second mercantile, this one with a feed and grain warehouse attached. Then a smithy, and then the other hotel which, as the livery man had told him, wasn’t rightly a hotel. He passed the entrance with a glance over the bat-wings, went on three paces and then stopped.

It wasn’t the off-voice piano that stopped him, nor the size of the place, which was considerable for such a town, nor the glimpse of pink satin and soft hair somewhere along the bar, nor even the bar itself, the longest and most elaborate he had ever seen. It was the array behind the bar—four tiers all of twenty feet long each, rows and rows of bottles of all sizes and shapes. He had to wonder if there wasn’t a fine old brandy there. He didn’t want it or need it, and he didn’t know if he’d like it or not, but Miz Appleton had said he ought to have it. It was like a service to her. The dinner seemed to mean more to her even than it had to him, and it just seemed right to finish it off the way she said.

So he turned back and went into the place.

The bartender was a squint-eyed oldster wrapped in a long white butcher’s apron. You had an idea who he was talking to when you were by yourself at the bar, but it must have been pretty mystifying when the place was crowded.

“You got any brandy?” Macleish asked.

One of the man’s eyes scanned Younger Macleish’s fancy vest while the other one raked the northwest corner.

“Reckon we have.”

“Real old brandy?”

“It’s old.”

“You got see-gars?”

“Two kinds. Most men wouldn’t smoke the one, an’ most men wouldn’t pay for the other.”

“Gimme the best,” said Younger Macleish. He remembered something else and said “Uh,” as the bartender was about to turn away. He couldn’t see himself asking for a flower vase to drink his brandy out of, so he asked for the other instead. “Bring me a extra shot-glass with the brandy.”

The bartender walked to the far end and got an old kitchen chair with the back off it, and carried it back and set it down. Grunting, he got up on it and reached for a bottle on the fourth tier. He brought it down and held it so Macleish could see the label, but didn’t set it down and didn’t bring glasses. “Suit you?”

The question was asked in a way that seemed to mean more than it said. Macleish wondered if it had anything to do with money. He noticed suddenly that the girl, the one with the pink satin dress and all that hair, was watching him. He went into his poke and got a gold ten dollars and laid it on the wood. “It’ll do,” he said as if he knew what he was talking about.

The bartender put the bottle down then and pulled the cork, and reached underneath for a glass with a small stem and a big bell, and the extra shot-glass. Macleish figured that if you drink brandy out of a big glass like that it must be something like beer; but when the bartender poured in only about a finger and quit, he remembered what Miz Appleton had said about the men smelling it. He took it and smelled it while the bartender went for the cigars. It smelled fine.

The bartender brought the cigar box and handed the whole thing to him, and he took out three. Two he stuck in his vest and got the other one going. The smoke was full-fleshed and kind to him. He took a little taste of the brandy and waited a second, and it was as if a good spirit had sat down in his throat in velvet pants. Turning his back to the bar and hooking up his elbows, he began a wordless worship of Miz Appleton and all her works. He was vaguely aware that the bartender was leaning across the far end, talking to the girl in pink, that the piano player expressed his disbelief in his own abilities by working with his fingers crossed, and that two faro games
were operating in the corner. But none of this mattered to him; and as he swung around to dunk his cigar in the shot-glass and caught the pink girl’s eye as she climbed the stairs to the gallery, the moment of self-consciousness was lost in pure joy when he took his first drag of the brandied smoke.

He stood in this golden trance for some minutes and nobody bothered him until the girl came back downstairs and walked over to him. He smiled at her because he was ready to smile at anything, but if it was the first word she waited for, she’d have to give it; he couldn’t think of a one.

“Hello,” she said.

Well, that was a good one. He gave it right back to her.

“Stranger here, aren’t you?” She was older than he had first thought, but not much. She had a real different kind of nose, thin as the back of a knife between her close-set eyes, and flaring out at the nostrils, which pointed more forward than down and were constantly aquiver. She was pretty enough, though, with all that hair. He admitted that he was a stranger, and took another smell of the brandy because he then and there ran out of anything else to say.

“Come to stay?” she asked him.

“Nope,” said Younger Macleish.

“That’s too bad,” said the girl, and then laughed briefly and loudly. “My,” she said, “you’re quite a one for talk, aren’t you?… You going to buy me a drink?”

“Oh!” said Macleish, feeling stupid. “Uh—sure.”

She nodded over his shoulder and the bartender brought her a pale something in a small glass. He also brought back change from Macleish’s money. He didn’t bring much.

“What are you going to do with yourself all evening?”

“Look around,” said Macleish uncomfortably.

It seemed to him that she waited altogether too long to say anything else, watching him the whole time. The bartender was watching him too, or her; he wouldn’t know. At last she burrowed into a pink beaded bag and withdrew a heavy gold compact. “Look here,” she said, and opened the lid. Macleish became aware of a faint tinkling. He leaned close and discovered that in shrill small bell-like
notes, the compact was playing “Peas, peas, goober peas.”

“Well, hey,” said Younger Macleish.

“I got more of them,” said the girl. “I got a powder box that plays a waltz and another one—that one’s only a straight music box—that plays the Trish-Trash Polka.”

“You
do?
” said Macleish, sounding quite as impressed as he was.

“You want to see ’em? I got them upstairs.”

He looked at her numbly. In his mind he had a swift flash of two crinolined sisters and a white-smiled schoolmarm, and—and the whole idea of going home to settle. Then there was this girl and what she said, it … it … Well, somehow, something was altogether mismatched.

“I guess I better not,” he mumbled.

“Oh—come
on!”
she said; and then, going all tight-lipped, “It’s just to see the music boxes. What do you think I
am?”

He knew his ears were getting red again; he could feel the heat. He wished he could get out of this. He wished he hadn’t come in. He wished he could curl up in his cigar-ash and go up in smoke. He said, “Well, all right.”

He drank up his brandy and it stung him harder than he wanted it to. He dipped his cigar once more in the shot-glass and followed her up the stairs. He was dead certain that both faro games must have stopped dead while he climbed, everyone watching, but when he flashed a glance from the top everything down there seemed as usual. It was about then he remembered to breathe again. He turned to follow the girl along the gallery.

She had opened a door and was waiting for him. “In here.”

It was black dark in there. If he thought anything at all, it was that she would follow him and light a lamp.

The instant he was clear of the door, it was kicked shut with the girl still outside, and he found himself in total blackness. Hands came from nowhere, took both arms, wrenched them behind him. “Whut—” he yelled, and got a stinging blow in the mouth before he could make another syllable. He kicked out and back as hard as he could, and his heel struck what felt like a shinbone. He heard a curse, and the red lightning struck him twice more on the cheek and on the ear.