The St. Francis Hotel is a setting for a brief reunion between Steve Maryk and Tom Keefer in San Francisco, but it also becomes a measure of the distance between Maryk’s childhood expectations and his present state. Its lobby and ornate dining room frame an afternoon that begins as a celebration of temporary freedom from Philip Francis Queeg and turns into an encounter with memory, class, and disorientation.

Meeting and Lunch

Tom Keefer is waiting for Steve Maryk in the hotel lobby, looking pallid and slight. They go to the ornate dining room for an elaborate, costly lunch. Keefer orders champagne to celebrate their temporary freedom from Queeg and drinks most of the bottle himself; Maryk thinks it tastes like sweet beer. Their contrasting responses to the meal capture the difference in their temperaments: Keefer makes the occasion into a performance, while Maryk remains uneasy and subdued.

Maryk’s Return to San Francisco

San Francisco is Maryk’s boyhood home. He has felt nostalgic since the USS Caine passed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, but returning to Market Street leaves him at a loss for what to do, and he wanders aimlessly until the appointed lunch. At the St. Francis Hotel, he recalls that as a child he thought only millionaires ate there. The costly meal therefore meets an old image of wealth, but it does not make him feel at ease: he says that everything seems gray and that he feels like a ghost in the familiar city. He estimates that about ten years have passed since his family moved to Pedro in 1933. Keefer interprets this return as an encounter with the passage of time, while Maryk answers with a wry joke about turning the thought into material for a novel.

From the Hotel to the Recall

The lunch is part of an afternoon plan rather than an isolated visit. Rain rules out the proposed walk across the Golden Gate Bridge, and Keefer instead takes Maryk to a literary tea in Berkeley, where Maryk feels painfully out of his depth beside Keefer’s literary fluency. Later, while the two are having dinner at a French restaurant overlooking the bay, Maryk makes a routine eight o’clock call to the ship’s office. He returns to the table visibly alarmed: they are wanted back aboard immediately. The hotel thus anchors a short interval of apparent release from shipboard command, but the recall cuts that interval short and carries the officers back to duty.