The Pillars of Hercules

—Cleopatra was not Egyptian. She was the daughter of a Macedonian general.

—The Athenians were gentle and democratic. They woke up. They had no breakfast. They ate one meal—porridge. They wore a sort of diaper, and a sheet. They went to the forum and talked. It was not a life of luxury.

At this mention of porridge, a huge man sitting behind me said to his wife, “Are you as hungry as I am?”

“The male passengers on this ship are so big,” a woman said to me that first lunchtime, “I thought they must all be members of a team of some kind.”

The white ship growled south bathed in full sunshine on the glittering sea, following the low shore of Italy that was never more than a long narrow stripe at the horizon, like the edge of a desert, a streak of glowing dust.

Our progress was following one of the oldest routes in the Mediterranean. “Coasting was the rule” in the Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel wrote in The Structures of Everyday Life. It was rare for any ship to risk the open sea, even as late as the seventeenth century, because the fear of the unknown was so great. “The courage required for such an unwonted feat has been forgotten.” Mediterranean sailors usually went from one port to the next, along the coast, and it was a brave sailor of the high seas who ventured out of the sight of land, from Mallorca to Sicily, or Rhodes to Alexandria. “The procession of coasting vessels steered by the line of the shore, to which they were constantly drawn, as if by a magnet.”

But our ship steered parallel to the coast for the pleasure of seeing it, and hovering, as a reminder of where we were.

The clear day of unobstructed sun became a blazing late afternoon, the western sky and sea alight, and at last in a reddening amphitheater of light, a buttery sunset.

An invitation had been clipped to my door: Did I wish to join the First Officer and his guests for dinner?

There were ten people, and the subject at my end of the table was what we did for a living.

Millie Hardnett said that her husband had made his fortune in specialty foods—canned fruit, jars of peaches in wine, exotic syrups—and after selling his business to a food conglomerate they now spent their time cruising.

Twisting his dinner roll apart, Max Hardnett asked me, “Someone told me you were a writer, Paul. Have you published anything under your own name?”

“My husband sold his company to Sara Lee,” the woman to my left said.

This was Mary Fuller, whose husband had founded Fuller Brush. And another fact: Sara Lee was a real person, a middle-aged woman whose father had named the cheesecake, the company, and everything else after her. She had a last name, but no one could remember it.

Her companion, Sappho, said to me, “Alfred wrote a book, too. You say you’re a writer? You should read it.”

A Foot in the Door, by Alfred Fuller, described (according to his widow) how he had grown tired of being a poor farmer in Nova Scotia and took a hint from his brother, who worked for a brush company, and decided to sell brushes door-to-door. What’s that? You mean I don’t have the brush you require? Well, describe it to me and I will supply it to you. Alfred was open to customers’ suggestions and created brushes to fill their needs. Bottle brushes, wide brooms, whisks and dust mops. This was pioneering salesmanship and soon Alfred had teams of men out there, ringing doorbells and hustling for commissions.

“It was a real Horatio Alger story,” she said.

“What do you think about that?” Sappho asked me.

“I met Arthur Murray once in Honolulu,” I said. Why was I telling her this? He was another famous name on a business. “I even know someone who danced with him. Arthur Murray taught her to dance in a hurry.”

“Alfred thought up the idea of direct selling,” Mary Fuller said. “It’s not popular now because of crime.”

She was ninety-one and kept to her wheelchair but she was not at all frail, and she had a good appetite. At times, surveying the table, she looked like a sea lion, monumental and slow in the way she turned her head. She kept her good health, she said, by visiting mineral baths in places like Budapest and Baden-Baden. She mumbled but she was lucid. She spent each summer in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.

“How did you meet Alfred?” I asked.

“He courted me in New York,” she said. “He was very determined. When he wanted something he got it. That’s why he was so successful in business, too. My mother called him ‘The Steam Roller.’ ”

She went on a cruise every year, she said. This simple assertion brought forth a torrent of cruise memories from the rest of the table.

“This is our sixth cruise in three years—”

“We were up the Amazon—”