Onions in the Stew Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Joan and Jerry and Anne and Bob–our best friends

  EPIGRAPH

  Where hearts were high and fortunes low, and onions in the stew.

  CHARLES DIVINE

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I No Money and No Furniture

  II Owner Desperate

  III Two Million if by Sea

  IV Life as Usual in a Very Unusual Setting

  V God Is the Boss

  VI We Made It Ourselves

  VII The Problem Is to Hold It Back

  VIII Cirripeds Not Wanted

  IX Other Friends and Enemies

  X Master of None

  XI Bringing in the Sheaves

  XII Triple That Recipe

  XIII Why Don’t You Just Relax, Betty?

  XIV Advice, Anybody?

  XV Adolescence, or Please Keep Imogene Until She Is Thirty

  XVI Onions in the Stew

  About the Author

  Also by Betty MacDonald

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  CHAPTER I

  NO MONEY AND NO FURNITURE

  FOR twelve years we MacDonalds have been living on an island in Puget Sound. There is no getting away from it, life on an island is different from life in the St. Francis Hotel but you can get used to it, can even grow to like it. “C’est la guerre,” we used to say looking wistfully toward the lights of the big comfortable warm city just across the way. Now, as November (or July) settles around the house like a wet sponge, we say placidly to each other, “I love it here. I wouldn’t live anywhere else.”

  I cannot say that everyone should live as we do, but you might be happy on an island if you can face up to the following:

  1. Dinner guests are often still with you seven days, weeks, months later and sleeping in the lawn swing is fun (I keep telling Don) if you take two sleeping pills and remember that the raccoons are just trying to be friends.

  2. Any definite appointment, such as childbirth or jury duty, acts as an automatic signal for the ferryboats to stop running.

  3. Finding island property is easy, especially up here in the Northwest where most of the time even the people are completely surrounded by water. Financing is something else again. Bankers are urban and everything not visible from a bank is “too far out.”

  4. A telephone call from a relative beginning “Hello, dear, we’ve been thinking of you . . .” means you are going to get somebody’s children.

  5. Any dinner can be stretched by the addition of noodles to something.

  6. If you miss the last ferry—the 1:05 A.M.—you have to sit on the dock all night, but the time will come when you will be grateful for that large body of water between you and those thirteen parking tickets.

  7. Anyone contemplating island dwelling must be physically strong and it is an added advantage if you aren’t too bright.

  Our island, discovered in 1792 by Captain Vancouver and named Vashon after his friend Admiral James Vashon, is medium sized as islands go, being approximately fifteen miles from shoulder to calf and five miles around the hips. It is green, the intense green of chopped parsley, plump and curvy, reposes in the icy waters of Puget Sound, runs north and south between the cities of Seattle and Tacoma and is more or less accessible to each by ferryboat.

  On the map Vashon Island looks somewhat like a peacock and somewhat like a buzzard. Which depends on the end you choose for the head and how long you have been trapped here. The climate, about ten degrees warmer and wetter than Seattle and vicinity is ideal for primroses, currants, rhododendrons, strawberries, mildew and people with dry skin who like to read. The population is around five thousand people and an uncounted number of sniveling cowards who move back to the city for the winter.

  Because of its location and the fact that it rises steeply from the water into high plateaus, Vashon Island is plethoric with views. Across the west are the fierce snowy craggy Olympic Mountains and the magnificent untamed Olympic Peninsula, black with timber, alive with game and fish, soggy with lakes and streams, quivering with wildness. Separating Vashon from the Olympic Mountains and Peninsula is the narrow, winding, lovely West Channel of Puget Sound. To the east are the smoky purple Cascade Mountains and Seattle. North are other islands, Bainbridge, Blake, Whidbey and the Olympic Mountains. South of us is Mount Rainier, that magnificent, unbelievably shy mountain who parts her clouds and shows her exquisite face only after she has made sure Uncle Jim and Aunt Helen are really on their way back to Minneapolis. Mount Rainier is 14,408 feet high which is higher than Fujiyama but only half as high as Mount Everest. It has twenty-six glaciers, listed in the encyclopedia as quite an accomplishment, and was also discovered by Captain Vancouver who seems to have spent a great deal of time cruising around this part of the world discovering things. Except in the very early morning or rare summer evenings when the foothills show, Mount Rainier appears to be a mirage floating in clouds, appearing and disappearing (mostly disappearing) just above the horizon.

  It is described locally as looking “just like a dish of ice cream”—strawberry or vanilla depending on the time of day. To make the description perfect, the ice cream should have pale blue sauce drooled over it.

  Everything on Vashon Island grows with insane vigor and you have the distinct feeling, as you leave the dock and start up the main highway, that you should have hired a native guide or at least brought along a machete. Alder, syringa, maple, elderberry, madroña, pine, salmonberry, willow, wild cucumber, blackberry, fir, laurel and dogwood crowd the edges of the roads turning them into green tunnels and only the assiduous chopping and slashing by the county and the telephone and power companies keeps this jungle from closing up the highways altogether.

  From the water Vashon looks like a stout gentleman taking a Sunday nap under a wooly dark green afghan. The afghan, obviously homemade, is fringed on the edges, occasionally lumpy, eked out with odds and ends of paler and darker wools, but very ample so that it falls in thick folds to the water. Against this vast greenness, houses scattered along the shore appear small and forlorn, like discarded paper boxes floated in on the tide. The few hillside houses look half smothered and defeated, like frail invalids in the clutches of a huge feather bed.

  The farm land of Vashon—Vashon is famous for its red currants, pie cherries, peaches, strawberries, gooseberries, boysenberries, loganberries, raspberries, chickens, eggs, goat’s milk, Croft lilies and orchids—is gently sloping and covered with plump green and brown patchwork fields tucked in around the edges with blanket-stitching fences. Scattered here and there over the landscape are rather dilapidated outbuildings, placid cows and goats stomach-deep in lush pasture, and churches. Churches are everywhere. Vashon was once, perhaps still is, a mecca for the more vigorously religious—Free Methodists, Baptists, and so on. The other milder religions have their small strongholds too. As Vashon still retains a pungent frontier atmosphere the over-all effect is faintly ridiculous—like a man sitting in the parlor in his undershirt, drinking beer and reading the Bible. A tiny white church up to its knees in non-ecclesiastical currant bushes holds a bony arm bearing a small cross high up toward the pale sky. A large hipped white church glares disapprovingly at the movie theatre across the way. A small brown church has its frail back braced against a horde of immense invading alders, its front porch sags wearily under a load of wild cucumber vines. A very old trembly gray church keeps its yard tidy and tries not to notice how its friends have fallen off. In among the churches are houses, mostly old, mostly shapeless and paintless, set in neat green yards, rearing up wild eyed and rickety out of tangles, peering out of thickets, hiding behind orchards or teetering nervously on the edge of bluffs above the water.
The newly built, freshly painted houses are either along the main highway or on the beaches. Vashon is not a geranium-planted-in-the-wheelbarrow, wagon-wheel-against-the-fence, Ye Olde Tea Shoppe community. Our ugliness is rawboned, useful, natural and honest. Our beauty is accidental, untampered with, often breathtaking.

  Oval ponds with flat silver surfaces lying in green fields like forgotten handmirrors. White pullets flapping across a green broadloom meadow like scraps of torn paper. A solitary maple tree sitting stolidly in the middle of an empty pasture, its full dark green skirt spread carefully over its thick ankles, a stout lady looking at the mountain. A red water tank spraddle-legged above rows of greenhouses, pale blue and cool like ice cubes. Green dance-hall streamers of boysenberry vines looped from post to post. Scotch broom pouring in over the hills like a flood of melted butter. Currant bushes bleeding red currants down their brown stems. Peach trees with freshly whitewashed trunks and crowded bright pink branches marching through newly plowed orchards like stiff bouquets. Strawberry patches rolling right up to the edge of the sky, the troughs between the plants scalloping the horizon.

  Every road on Vashon leads to the water eventually. From almost every inch of the island we can see either the water or Mount Rainier or the Olympics or the Cascades or all four. All the edges of the island are fringed with the black spikes of virgin firs.

  There are several very high points, perhaps a thousand feet or more above the water. From these places we can look down at the gray-blue Sound winding among islands dark and hairy with trees. The tides and currents show up in the channels like spilled ink. The ferryboats are white ducks waddling earnestly from shore to shore. The channel directly in front of our house, known as the East Channel, is the test course for the Bremerton Navy Yard. During the war our horizon was crossed by a steady procession of large serious gray vessels. Today we see only occasional battleships, destroyers or aircraft carriers, but every evening dark red and orange freighters glide toward the Strait; their booms fore and aft, picked out by the late sunshine, look like Tinker Toys. Filmy scarves of gray smoke trail behind them, a heavy wake thunders in to shore after they are out of sight. At night or in the early morning we hear the chunk, chunk, chunk of tugs no bigger than chips, huffing and puffing as they drag huge fantails of logs to the mills. Sometimes we see a school of blackfish leaping about in the sunshine like playful submarines. They slap their tails on the water and a glistening spray goes fifty feet in the air.

  As I say, almost every inch of Vashon Island has a view, but the gullies, ravines, deep hollows and collars of the highway with no view except gray sky, wet woods and the ferry cars, seem to be the preferred home sites. We have our own school of architecture too—known in our family as a “Halvorsen House.” A Halvorsen House, obviously the offspring of the mating of a gas station with a park restroom, is undeniably sturdy, has small high nearsighted windows under the eaves, a narrow brimmed roof jammed low on its forehead, no fireplace, no view, but it is anchored to its land by an enormous full cement basement or cellar. Even in the recent real estate slump Halvorsen Houses sold as fast as they were built.

  The town of Vashon, quite a typical western, crossroads settlement, is small, flourishing, friendly, adequate and tacky. It has a bank, library, bakery (that bakes the most delicious bread in the world), two restaurants, shoestore, movie theatre, ice cream store, television shop, radio shop, state liquor store, bowling alley, drugstore, two hardware stores, two grocery stores, beauty parlor, variety shop (combination dry-goods and ten-cent store) two dress shops, two doctors, two dentists, an optician, a community club, several real estate offices, a funeral parlor, three gas stations and car repair shops, a post office, print shop and newspaper office, a bulldozing and heavy-equipment contractor (whose huge machines scoop out dams, cut logs, build roads down cliffs, push back the Sound with sea walls, and clear land), a furniture store, cleaner, barbershop, taxi, beer parlor, florist and of course its generous complement of churches. All the buildings are different. Most of them have high fronts like caps with the visors turned up—some are low and squashed like railway express packages—some have glass bricks set into the wall like clinics—one or two are made of banana-colored stucco—a couple are red brick. Vashon reminds me of a nice girl who doesn’t know how to dress. Her pink hat, green dress, brown coat, black shoes, gray stockings, yellow scarf, orange belt and purple gloves will keep out the rain but they’ll never get her elected Peach Festival Queen.

  The stores of Vashon have nothing in common with the early day, “hay, bacon, gasoline and soft drinks” country store. Our stores are modern, well stocked and obliging—if they don’t have it they will get it. Only occasionally do they show signs of naïveté. Once when we first moved here I sent Don to get me some wild rice purposely forgetting to tell him it was $2.25 a package. He came home with eight boxes and after I had stopped screaming he explained defensively, “I only had one but the woman at the checking counter said that as long as they were two for a quarter why didn’t I take a couple more, so I did. We can use it, can’t we? She said ‘Wild rice don’t go good in Vashon. It’s a slow-mover.’”

  Ten years ago a good steak dinner including soup and pie and coffee was forty-five cents—now it is a dollar without the soup. Haircuts used to be thirty-five cents—now are a dollar. Eight years ago half-soles were $1.75—today they are $1.75.

  Everybody goes to Vashon on Saturday. The sidewalks overflow with harassed mothers in blue jeans herding parades of lagging children; worried old people talking in low voices as they try to stretch their pensions; Indians lolling against the buildings eating ice cream cones; red-cheeked farmers tossing plump sacks of feed into the back of old trucks; husbands waiting martyred in parked cars; giggling schoolgirls with shifty eyes pushing each other off the sidewalks; small boys making odd buzzing noises as they dart around the shoppers; plump gray-haired women in starched housedresses studying long lists or giving the high school girls cruel eyes; spindly-legged grocery boys staggering under mountainous loads as they search wildly for “that red sedan with the dent in the fender”; men with greasy hair and pants, low on their hips, hanging around the beer parlor; boys with crew cuts and blue jeans, low on their hips, hanging around old cars.

  At night from the north end of Vashon we can see the lights of Seattle glittering on the horizon like a lapful of costume jewelry. From the south end the lights of Tacoma twinkle briskly along the water, then blaze up and mingle with the stars. We like this. We say, there just across the water is a city of almost a million—another of a quarter of a million is there. We can go there any time. It assures us that we are here by choice.

  How is it we moved to Vashon Island in the first place? Well, it was just after Pearl Harbor and my husband, Donald, and I had recently met and married. Up to the time of our marriage I had been living at home with my two children, Anne twelve and Joan eleven, my mother and two of my four sisters, in a brown house in the University District where we had numerous pets, a great deal of fun, hordes of company and hardly any money.

  I was working for a contractor who was building something or other, very vital, for the government at terrific expense in Alaska. It seems to me that I have heard that it was a dock and somebody forgot to take the tides into consideration and so most of the times it stands thirty feet above the water. Anyway my title was Chief Clerk which sounds impressive but wasn’t, as I spent my days drinking coffee and checking purchase orders for: 500 cans cabbage—#2½—at 16ȼ ea. . . . $80.00. I didn’t have to check the price or the totals—we had a man for that job (very responsible—required arithmetic). All I had to do was to see that the mimeographing was clear and “cabbage” was spelled right. I was paid $47.50 a week which was never enough but was considered marvelous pay for a woman in those days in Seattle where it is still the prevailing idea that all female employees (bless their little hearts) would really rather be home baking Toll House cookies and any male not down on all fours (this does not include the government where you can be
even farther down if political affiliations are okay) is automatically paid twice as much as the brightest female.

  Don, who was doing final test at the Boeing Airplane Factory (I don’t remember his salary, but it never seemed to be enough either), shared a rather dank, dark hillside duplex just off the campus of the University of Washington with an intellectual pal who read philosophy by candlelight, never shaved, tucked fishbones behind the cushions of the couch and considered a thorough housecleaning the tacking of another Japanese print over another spot of mildew. On stormy evenings, with a fire on the hearth and enough martinis, the apartment seemed rather desirable, but I shuddered when I thought of it in the daylight.

  Then Don’s roommate suddenly decided to take his fishbones to Algiers and Don asked me to marry him. We spent our weekend honeymoon (all that was allowed defense workers) in the apartment sans the roommate but avec the mildew, an eviction notice from the landlord who was tired of intellectuals, a shutoff notice from the gas company (gas had been roommate’s responsibility, Don explained) and an old buddy of Don’s who turned up in quite an unsteady condition and couldn’t or wouldn’t grasp the fact that “good ole Don” was married. I was beginning to wonder if he was, especially as Boeing for a wedding present had transferred him to the graveyard shift, which meant that he would work all night, I would work all day and we would see each other and the children briefly on Sundays. The eviction notice stated firmly that we were to be out of the apartment by the following Monday. From Monday to Friday I visited practically every real estate office in the city (roof-over-head seemed to be this roommate’s responsibility) and was told by each that there was nothing to rent, there never had been anything to rent, there never would be anything to rent and “there’s a war on!”

  Sunday evening Don and Anne and Joan and I were sitting in front of the fire in his apartment feeling like people without passports, when the very charming Japanese professor, who with his wife lived in the top part of the duplex, came down and told us that they were being sent to internment camp and we could have their apartment. We thanked him fervently, but felt like grave snatchers as we piled into the car and raced over to see the landlord who was old and not friendly and brought out a list two miles long of applicants who he said were of much longer standing and much more desirable and didn’t have children. Don talked and talked in his quiet voice, I sat up straight and tried to look like a good tenant and the girls explained earnestly to the landlord, who had big tufts of hair in his ears, that they weren’t to be considered “children”—that most hated word in landlord language—as they were very old and anyway they were just going to visit until school was out. Finally, grudgingly, the landlord agreed to let us have the apartment but he called after us in a loud voice as we were getting in the car, “I expect you folks to tend to business now. No wild parties and don’t let the pipes freeze.” Anne and Joan thought this hysterically funny and collapsed in the back seat in giggles. I was furious. I thought the landlord was rude and unfair and I wanted Don to do something manly and retaliative. I demanded it.