As for what was authentic to the Puritan experience, Gregor decided he wouldn’t have blamed these people if they’d decided to hold a Thanksgiving as soon as they hit land, to thank God just for letting them off their boat. The sheer misery of this existence shed a whole new light on Thanksgiving dinners full of chestnut stuffing and candied yams. Gregor had always thought that rich American WASPS failed to celebrate Thanksgiving (or anything else) with enthusiasm because they were too damned polite to have enthusiasms. Now he wondered if it was some kind of race memory. In their bones they remembered their ancestors’ voyage from England. In their heads, they didn’t think they had anything to celebrate.
Coming down from the upper deck, Gregor had worked out a plan to make sure he would end up seated next to Bennis Hannaford, but when it came time to put the plan in action, he was foiled. Bennis had gotten to the mess much earlier than he had expected her to. When Gregor reached the door, she was already inside, pushed up against the back wall with Tony on her side and Calvin across from her. She was even on the wrong side of the table. The side where Calvin Baird was sitting left a good bit of space behind the chairs, so that it wouldn’t be difficult for someone to get up and go out of the room during dinner. The side where Bennis was sitting had the chairs much closer to the wall. Sheila Baird and Julie Anderwahl had taken chairs on that side now. Gregor wondered if they thought the tight fit would keep them from falling over if the boat pitched. Then Charlie Shay sat down next to Julie, and Gregor gave up speculating altogether. Fritzie Baird had taken a seat next to Calvin and Mark Anderwahl had taken one next to Fritzie. There were now only two seats left, both on the Calvin Baird side of the table. Since Jon Baird was obviously waiting for Gregor to seat himself, Gregor decided to do it. He pulled out the chair next to Mark Anderwahl’s, tried and failed to catch Bennis’s eye, and sat down.
His move seemed to break a conversational barrier. Calvin Baird coughed. Sheila Baird giggled.
“Look,” Sheila said, picking up a mason jar from a row of mason jars in the middle of the table. “Pumpkin rind marmalade. Fritzie has been making preserves again.”
“I like to do something special for the holidays,” Fritzie said stiffly. “If you don’t do something special for a holiday, it isn’t a holiday at all.”
Julie Anderwahl jumped in. “Oh, Lord,” she said. “I’ve been smelling cooking all afternoon and it’s just been terrible. I hope you’re not serving us roast buffalo meat.”
“The Puritans didn’t have buffalo meat,” Jon Baird said. “They’d never seen a buffalo. I don’t even know if they ever did see a buffalo. Wasn’t it a western animal?”
“There’s Buffalo, New York,” Charlie Shay said. “Would they have named it Buffalo if there hadn’t been any buffalos there?”
“Jon likes everybody to think he knows so much about the original Mayflower,” Sheila said, “but he really doesn’t.”
There was a knock on the door. Jon Baird called, “Come in,” and a white-jacketed young man entered with a large covered tray in his hands. It was the kind of thing that in movies is always opened to reveal a stuffed goose, and Gregor half-suspected that a goose was what he was going to be presented with. Jon Baird, however, was even less stringently insistent on the “authentic” than his second wife had accused him of being. He waited until the young man had put the tray down in the middle of the table, jumped up, and said, “Here we go. Salad. Hand me your plates, ladies and gentlemen, and I’ll dish out.”
“Did they have salad on the original Mayflower?” Julie Anderwahl wondered out loud. “I didn’t think they had salad at all until the twentieth century.”
“Oh, they had to have had salad a long time before that,” Fritzie said. “The French, you know. The French have always been interested in salads.”
“I don’t think they had tossed salads much before that,” Tony Baird said. He stood up and handed his plate to his father, took it back, then took Bennis’s and handed over hers. “I don’t really care what the Puritans ate. From what I’ve heard, it had a lot of lard in it.”
“From what I’ve heard, it had a lot of sugar in it.” Julie Anderwahl took her filled salad plate from Jon and immediately began to munch on a sliver of cucumber. “I think about what it would be like sometimes, to live in a world where everybody was just expected to get fat as they got older. That way you could eat what you wanted and never have to think about diets.”