Eating - Jason Epstein [14]
In 1936, Fisher was living in Dijon. She had tired of her professor husband and dreaded the prospect of afternoons back in the United States in a brown satin dress nibbling marshmallow salad with other faculty wives. She had, moreover, fallen head over heels in love with a man named Dillwyn Parrish, an American writer and artist. In her book she discreetly calls him Chexbres, Basque for “goat,” revealing his actual identity only much later, in a memoir toward the end of her life. From Dijon they came to earth in Vevey, where they rebuilt an old farmhouse, from whose terrace they had a clear view across Lake Geneva to the mountains. But “when the terrace was too cool or breezy we set a long French table in front of the open French windows and if the Lake seemed too wide and the Alps too high we could look into the great mirror opposite and make them more remote, less questioning of us.” This is the essential Fisher, for whom the Alps must accommodate her when she and her lover sit down to lunch.
Their house had red tile floors, gardens, and good food. “In the summer there were always a lot of people: Vevey was on the road to almost any place in Europe and Le Paquis was such a pleasant little stop,” she wrote, referring to their house. “Sometimes there were complications, political, national, religious, even racial but in general we managed to segregate the more violent prejudices. Once Chexbres had taken three socialists who were on their way to join the Spanish Loyalists to Cully for filet of perch while I served supper at Le Paquis to several charming but rabid Fascists from Rome, one of them a priest and all of them convinced that Communists were their personal as well as national enemies.”
But it is not the twittering fascists who hold the reader’s attention: it is the unseen Loyalist volunteers eating perch with Chexbres on their way to fight and perhaps be killed by fascists in Spain, a prospect that Fisher leaves to the reader’s imagination. Earlier in that terrible year of Depression and war, she, her mother, and Chexbres had returned to Europe on the German vessel Hansa, “a tidy, plump little ship.” “There was something comfortable about her, and at the same time subtly coarse and vulgar,” an ugliness that was “part of what is happening now in the world … while men stunt their souls,” Fisher wrote presciently in 1937, when few could yet grasp the unspeakable ugliness to come even as the men stood up in the ship’s dining room “and lifted their glasses to the picture of Hitler at one end of the room.” At night in her “clean and cozy” stateroom with “light shining on the cherry-satin feather-puff and the gleaming sheets,” she would lock the door against evil and “the sickness and terror of the Hansa’s homeland.” She wrote, “There was always a little silver tray in my cabin at night: thin sandwiches of rare beef, a pepper mill, a tiny bottle of cold champagne.” In the morning, she would meet Chexbres for a twelve o’clock beer in the bar, and so they fell in love.
The most poignant of Fisher’s memories of this period begins with sentences worthy of Isak Dinesen which could not have been written better by Hemingway that year. “There was a train, not a particularly good one, that stopped at Vevey about ten in the morning on the way to Italy. Chexbres and I used to take it to Milano. It had a restaurant car, an old-fashioned one with the agreeable austerity of a third-class station café about it: brown wooden walls and seats, bare tables unless you ordered the highest-priced lunch, and a few faded advertisements for Aspirina Bayer and ‘Visitez le Maroc’ permanently crooked above the windows. There was one table, next to the galley, where the cooks and waiters sat. In the morning they