Plea for a Patriarch

‘HE is old,’ they said; ‘he leaks, and the ants banquet merrily in his warm stomach. We must progress,’ they said. ‘We must get us a new ice box — an electric one. Do away with this big old elephant. He has soured the first baby bottles and put mould on the marriage meats. Away with him!’ And so we must progress; eliminate the unexpected and the disturbing. Our ideal is the pancake. Round and smooth and free of all bumps. No longer will the opening of the ice box be an adventure. Gone all mystery and surprise. No ant or insect will enter the cold portals of a mechanical refrigerator. We shall never open and find there a long trail of little bodies, walking quietly away with bits of ham in their gentle mouths. There will be no coming on the mounds of blue moss that hide the forgotten vegetable in some dark corridor, or the long gray beard of a patriarchal sandwich, mellowed behind a jelly jar. Our lives will be monotonous, circumscribed, and colorless. We shall take up our milk and drink without first tasting warily, and no longer know that faint, indescribable tang of the first souring — a blue, whimsical, and persimmony taste that teases the palate with its indecision.

The iceman will become a legend. No longer the cold pools where his great bar rested, the sudden bursting forth of silver lumps whenever the door is opened, the frosty probing here and there in crevasses for the lost white body of a celery, and the coming on ancient radishes when the great ice boulder has dwindled to a clod. No longer will the coy pick hide out of reach between the box and wall, and gone will be the great uneven ice splinters that crammed their way into the glasses and sat wedged there against the rim, bumping the eager nose. All these must pass.

There will pass also the ancient and traditional laws of shelving. In the new box it will matter not what is where. The butter may wander from shelf to shelf without fear of dissolving in mellow and soft undulations, the lettuce will rattle and pop wherever its place, and the stout body of an apple intrude in those parts once reserved for only the most perishable and delicate of creams. But in the great body of the old ice box the shelving of food is more rigidly defined and inexorable than any caste or creed. There is a tradition of place unquestioned — an aristocracy of the fragile, and a peasantry of the rind. On those shelves where the air is not icy cold, where motes and germs of the outside world creep in and breed, lie the tough and pock-marked grapefruit, the pickled pears dark in their pool of syrup, protected from decay by virtue and vinegar. Here is the mouse cheese, hard and invulnerable, wrapped and shapeless, time and again deceiving the cook in search of some longvanished, more useful food. Here are the ancient jellies, turned to a pale and glutinous mass with sugar crystals at the rim — not quite good enough to use or bad enough to throw away; probed sometimes in a tentative dreamy way and shoved aside again. Here, too, those various tins once poked inside and forgotten, and all those things to be kept both ’dry and cold’ and so placed here where it is neither.

These are the commoners and rabble, but in the coldest, most austere cavities of the old box, nearest to the ice, and sheltered from all contact with the evil and wandering molecules of destruction, stand the white buckets of milk — cold, thin, and blueblooded, the fat velvet of their cream packed in glass jars about them. The gold pound of butter, solid and robust here, but collapsing in sour folds of yellow soup once taken up in the fertile air; the delicate brief fish, damp opalescent scales pressed hard against the ice, eyes popping out at nothing; the thin-leaved lettuce ready to faint at breath. Here, too, the bull-faced, squirely roast, which for all its solid health and lustiness is quick prey to the living air. And in between these layers are those little pots and jars which are always quickly consumed, and never, except through extreme age, achieve that capricious delicacy of nature which makes imperative their removal to a more sheltered spot — the white scrapings of the spaghetti bowl, the stray lima bean slowly coagulating in a pool of sauce, like a small green hippopotamus in his wallow. Here the noncommittal, the enigmatic eggs, the yellow and unctuous bowl of mayonnaise, gathering a gold crust on its top, and behind it the white cheese cone, colander-pressed, and wearing still its white pimples.

He has seen much, this old ice box — the dozens of stuffed eggs for the Ladies’ Guild that never came, the pale, insipid junkets and tough blancmanges that sat heavy in the stomach of our childhood, the cool red watermelon that the cook ate up, the brown and horrible mould of our first cooking. He has known the swift, nervous subdivision ot desserts and the dark, wrinkled faces of the prune; and there is little that he has not held, from the strong mysterious dog ration to the rare and sacred steak, and little that he has not heard, from the muttered recipe for rolls to the loud and pregnant silence that follows the splintering of a dish, the slow gurgle of milk down narrow drains. . . .

How shall we give him up — this great old mansion? A little too warm of heart, perhaps, but with cool and solid bulk. Bearing on his head the boltless screw, the crippled clothespin, and, always, the prone, exhausted lettuce leaf. Shall we forget his rich personality, forget the long accumulation of memories and odors, and take in his place this cold and lifeless thing, impervious to time and season, without speck or ant or soul? No! A thousand times no! Let this be not his epitaph but his salutation — recognition at last of one who has rendered long and benignant service, preserving in his calm, neutral bosom the memory, if not the presence, of countless long-vanished meals.

And so let him remain and be gathered to his fathers in his own appointed time.