By Francesco Bianchini
Anyone who has tasted clam chowder for the first time on a terrace facing the summer breeze of the Atlantic will never forget it. Herman Melville thus describes the dish in Moby Dick:
“It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit and salted pork cut into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt.”
The Misquamicut Coast
The soup arrived at the table, steaming. It came between me and Richard, who sat backlit by the fading sun. He looked at me for a moment with an air of asking, All good? But he didn’t say a word. Instead, he began to fill in the blanks left dangling from the impromptu meeting, listing the many excellent reasons why anyone would prefer the enchantment of the Rhode Island coast to the fiery heat of Baltimore, from which I had just emerged after a seven-hour bus ride. The wind-blown dunes, the secluded coves dotted with sails, the lighthouses guarding the inlets, the villages with their colonial charm, blah blah blah. Yes, of course—but I already knew all that. Dazed, I listened with half an ear.
Watch Hill, Rhode Island
“I’ve ordered clam chowder for dinner,” I’d told my first Daniel over the phone just before returning to the restaurant table. He had insisted on knowing where I was. He said he felt responsible for me, that it wasn’t fair to keep him in the dark. He asked whether the chowder was made with cream or with tomatoes. I told him I’d call back to let him know, then hung up.
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Chowder by geography: Manhattan and New England
The chowder’s base ingredient might have offered Daniel a clue as to my whereabouts. If it had been tomato-based, he could have placed me in the New York area, maybe Long Island. Cream-based, I could be anywhere in the vastness of New England. I loved the idea of being a lost speck in that vastness. A speck invisible to any radar—especially Daniel’s, from whose suffocating apartment and endless waves of abuse I had fled into the blistering heat of one of the hottest summers the East Coast had seen in the past century.
After agonizing for hours on the journey, wondering whether I’d leapt from the frying pan into the fire, I was now savoring the silky, fragrant soup one spoonful at a time, comforted. The cream perhaps overpowered the flavor of the clams a little—true—but unlike the Manhattan version with tomatoes, it didn’t aim to tease or enhance the seafood taste. It soothed.
Richard was the gentle soul who had taken me in without too many questions. Now, as the violet glow of twilight wrapped around us and the restaurant lights cast a warm glow over our table, I watched him as he spoke, tossing in the occasional witticism, most of which missed their mark, probably due to my exhaustion. He seemed harmless, like a quirky elf—certainly not attractive. I preferred to forget the photo he had sent me months earlier, leather-clad and crouched on a tree branch like some feline fantasy. I imagined him instead foraging for blueberries in the Connecticut woods or tossing hay bales in a barn, wearing denim overalls. This was going to be a restful interlude.
In the car, I hadn’t been able to keep my eyes open, but once we arrived, I was wide awake with wonder. Richard lived in a large early American house with white clapboard siding and green shutters, flanked by two towering white oaks that gracefully separated it from the village’s main street. In perfect Federal style, the interiors featured nothing post-1830. Though it was already late, Richard insisted I tour every room, giving a detailed inventory of each by the flicker of bulbs made to imitate candlelight.
Federal purity: Richard’s place
In the wee hours, I finally retreated to my bedroom. Just as I was about to collapse into bed, Richard appeared in a rough hemp nightshirt, holding a candle that cast his distorted shadow on the wall—a little like the witch from Hansel and Gretel. As if our voices might disturb the theatrical ambiance he had so carefully constructed, he signaled for me to sit up and give him a big bear hug before vanishing, leaving me in the dark.
An exquisite eye for detail
Despite the exhaustion of the journey and the long evening, despite the coolness of the night after weeks of infernal heat, I didn’t sleep well. I awoke with a start, as if something were pressing on my chest and face. The bacon? The cream in the soup? Perhaps the heavy New England quilt? The kind you now find only in folk art museums or sold in antique shops for thousands of dollars? And yet, I believed I needed precisely that lingering buttermilk taste in my mouth, that soft, overstuffed bed—the whole ensemble of maternal care—after the weeks of tension with Daniel.
I would have loved a lazy morning, but Richard came to wake me up early. Breakfast was waiting downstairs. No time to waste! Before bed, I had told him that in the morning I could barely stomach anything but a cup of coffee and maybe something savory. Richard wouldn’t hear of it. Under the stern gazes of ancestral portraits in the dining room, he had laid out a calorie-laden feast drenched in fresh cream and dripping with maple syrup.
He insisted I come hear him play the organ in church. In the pews of the white chapel—scented with mothballs and beeswax—I found my thoughts drifting back to life with Daniel, to the hurricanes of sudden fury on days when not a cloud darkened the sky. I pictured him holding me up while I vomited my guts out after eating Chesapeake Bay crabs, gills and all—the so-called “dead man’s fingers” he hadn’t thought to warn me about. He had a way of looking at me, at certain times of day, that seemed to penetrate even my most embryonic thoughts and drag them out of hiding. What a laugh he would have had seeing me now, sitting stiffly among the tiny congregation, while the man who had offered me refuge from him wheezed away at the organ bellows, clumsily recovering from one off-key note after another.
Richard had mapped out the following days so meticulously that the only thing I managed to squeeze into his tight schedule was cooking dinner one evening. I made one of the three dishes I could prepare blindfolded. We ate very late because navigating his kitchen—resolutely hostile to modernity—was a challenge. Every time I needed the fridge, I had to open a cabinet with a complicated latch. The faucet on the stone sink was inconveniently hidden beneath a wicker basket. I could only use period-appropriate utensils that didn’t require electricity. I served the meal lukewarm, waiting for him to finish setting up one of his elaborate stage settings in the red barn behind the house, complete with lantern on the roof.
Stage setting for the last supper
When it was time to catch the bus back to Daniel, the air seemed finally lighter, as if July’s oppressive heat had loosened its grip. At the terminal, I stepped out of the car with a quick nod toward Richard. As the bus prepared to leave, a sudden thought crossed my mind—and with it, the memory of a different taste, sharper somehow, that for some reason made me smile.
