The St. Francis Hotel is the setting for Steve Maryk and Tom Keefer’s lunch in San Francisco, a brief celebration of their temporary freedom from Captain Queeg. Its ornate dining room and costly meal sharpen the contrast between Keefer’s festive escape and Maryk’s growing sense that his boyhood city no longer feels like home.

Setting and Encounter

After arriving in San Francisco, Maryk spent the morning wandering aimlessly until one o’clock. Keefer met him in the hotel lobby, slouched in an armchair and looking pallid and weedy; together they went into the ornate dining room for an elaborate, expensive lunch. The hotel thus provides a planned rendezvous and a pause in the men’s shipboard lives, rather than a return to the familiarity Maryk had anticipated.

The Lunch and Its Unease

Keefer ordered champagne to mark their temporary freedom from Captain Queeg and drank most of the bottle himself. Maryk found it tasted like sweet beer and remained subdued. He could not explain why he felt that something bad was in the air, describing the day and the hotel as gray and strange. The luxurious setting therefore frames not uncomplicated relief but Maryk’s foreboding and dislocation.

Memory and Departure

San Francisco had been Maryk’s boyhood home, and he had felt nostalgic for it since the USS Caine passed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. At the St. Francis, however, he recalled that as a child he had thought only millionaires ate there; now, dining in its grand room, he felt like a ghost. He said his family had moved to San Pedro in 1933, about ten years earlier, and judged the city harshly on this return. Rain against the window ended the prospect of walking across the Golden Gate Bridge, a plan Maryk had teased Keefer about. Keefer dismissed that idea as romantic nonsense and proposed going instead to Berkeley, where an English professor had invited them to a literary tea.