The first journal I ever kept was of the trip to Europe with Mama. “The historian,” Gramp used to say, “is superior to his class, inferior to his habits.” I don't suppose Mama ever felt she was making history, but her war against the British was a well-fought series of battles, except that instead of drums and cannon, we used a tzigane playing his Magyar fiddle-music and czardas, whom Gramp had found in a small eating place near the India docks below Limehouse Reach. He played louder than better.
Mama's war started when we got to London from our boat train. It was at a neat, over-aged hotel called Ormsbee Arms. From the window of our suite we could see St. Paul's and Old Bailey silhouetted against a dull, loosely hung sky. London smelled like a Long Islan horseshow.
Aunt Fran and I sat down, and Gramp went out to get a Schweppes lime… he said. Mama pulled off her gloves an looked around the sitting room of the suite, like a painter rejecting a soiled nude.
“Has it been aired since the Queen slept here?”
The manager said softly, “The Queen… bless 'er memory… she slept in the other wing.”
Aunt Fran yawned. “Show us that wing and we'll creep under it.”
“Hit's been pulled down,” said the manager, closing the door with him on the other side of it.
Mama took off her hat, brushed some soot from the end of my nose, and patte the clean handkerchief in my jacket pocket. “Now Stevie, just remember, the English are a great race and very strange.”
“Is Aunt Tillie strange, too?”
Mama called me a jughead and made me like down for an hour.
I suppose Aunt Tillie was the only one of us who ever spoke back to a king (“Be yourself,” she said to Edward, son of Victoria, on his yacht one day. “I never let a man with a beard kiss me before dinner.…”). Aunt Tillie ha been a great beauty, and everyone went around saying what a great shame it was that she had begun to fade at forty… or was it sixty? Her age was a Masonic secret.
She had also begun to wrinkle, crackle, creak, and sag. “Hell,” she used to say, smoking one of her little black cigars shaped like a cigarette, “there's plenty of life in the old girl yet… but who wants it? Nobody!”
Aunt Tillie was Gramp's youngest sister… and the only one at that time still alive. She had left home one night at the age of eighteen… dropped ten feet from her room into the arms of a stockbroker (who had not as yet been caught short a half a million dollars in customers' money). They went to Nice, where the stockbroker was run over by the first of the automobiles only a short time after he said, “The auto will never amount to anything.” Aunt Tillie found that the money hadn't lasted very well. She married a retired major of Bengal Horse and went to live with him somewhere below Southwark, where he had a villa. It didn't last. Aunt Tillie was a betting gal, and she went to see the Derby run one warm day and never went back to the Major. The Major claimed she had lost the address. Of course, we all knew Aunt Tillie had been read from the family circle—and that she was something in French that meant she was a lady of loose leisure, or something, an we always said we hadn't heard from her in years… as if she had started for the North Pole.
She was really very advanced for her times. She was arrested twice for asking for the vote, once she chained herself to the gates at Buckingham Palace an shouted, “Women are human, too, your Queenship! Give us the vote…!” (She got six months hard for that.) She was also the first white woman to tell Kipling he was a dreadful poet, and to buy a Monet painting. Then Aunt Tillie dropped from the public eye.
After Edward (who was son of the Queen) became king, she surprised us all by settling down and marrying a mil little man who imported cheese, and was very rich, and loved Aunt Tillie very much. Aunt Tillie went respectable with a bang… or without a bang… for she became very much the wife of a great importer and gave up almost all of her interesting habits. For fifteen years no one had heard of her.
We had not told her we were coming to England. In those days ladies didn't speak of their underwear or Aunt Tillie in public.…
About five that day, in our suite at the Ormsbee Arms, there was a rattle of ol iron (which told us the lift was rising, like the fumes of dead sinners from hell), and five minutes later there was a colossal knock at the door… as if William the Conqueror had come back and was attacking the shores of England again.
Mama opened the door, and there stood the remains of Aunt Tillie. She was thinner, and wrapped in fox furs and flowers.
She held out her arms to Mama an said, “Welcome to the tight little isle.… You're Sara, I guess.”
Mama nodded. “We've met at some weddings.”
“It still goes on, this taking in marriage,” she said. “Well, I thought I' totter over and see the family. I'm an old, lonely gal.…”
“So we've heard,” said Aunt Fran, who hadn't at all.
“My sister Fran,” said Mama. “An this is Stevie. He's seeing Europe for the first time.”
“A hell of a time,” said Aunt Tillie. “Europe is going to burn from both ends, and explode in the middle. Stevie, come kiss your old battleaxedof an aunt.”
I did.… She smelled of violets, good Scotch, and shaving lotion. She looked at me and patted my head. Her last husband was dead.…
“Too bad, boy, you're going to grow up in a dying world. Our age is going to die slowly between many wars. Everything will go… our culture, our ease, our habit of calling God our rich neighbor, our…” (my journal is full of such remarks).
Mama said, breaking into a very interesting talk, “I'm going out to buy Stevie an Eton jacket… I hope you'll pardon us?”
“Where is the Old Rip?” asked Aunt Tillie, lighting one of her little black cigars (this was an age when ladies did not smoke cigarettes… and cigars were even worse).
“You mean Gramp?” asked Aunt Fran.
“To think that old buzzard is a grandfather!”
“Six or seven times if we count little Rose,” I said.
“We count little Rose,” said Mama, growing very white around the nose, an her chin going very firm. Mama did not approve of Aunt Tillie. Just then the door opened and Gramp walked in, chewing on a coffee bean, a habit he had when traveling with Mama… since Mama did not like gentlemen to reek of good whisky in front of small children.
“Hell's hot corner!” said Gramp. “Tillie!”
“Magna Charta!” said Aunt Tillie, using the great document as an oath, I fear. Brother and sister wrasseled for position in each other's arms. It was touching. Even Mama smiled in a small way.
Gramp took us to a little place on a side street where they used to cut off heads in the old days… but where they only killed pheasants when we were there. You had to be known to a duke or a music hall comic before they would even let you eat there. And they always made you call up first and give your name before coming.
They made only one dish, and it was always served with your name on it. Pheasant Longstreet, or Pheasant Smith, or Pheasant Cohen, depending on what your name was at the moment.
Aunt Tillie told us in the old days she had had the dish under several names. Aunt Fran said, very low, that she could very well understand that; but Mama gave her the elbow in the politest way, and we ate our way through a lot of Pheasant Longstreet.
Gramp had them give him the trick of making it… here it is: Get your pheasant, bone it, and flatten it out. Stuff it with a dressing of the bird's own liver, truffles, mushrooms, chives, parsley, salt, pepper, and beef marrow beaten with butter. Tie up the bird after wrapping it in slices of white bread and thin spice ham. Roast in a tightly covered vessel as slowly as you dare. Pour its own hot juice over it, and serve… serve with a Clos de Cîteaux—about the best of the dry Burgundys, a waiter honestly told Mama one day. If you can't get the Clos de Cîteaux, I might suggest a California wine in its place.
Even Aunt Tillie admitted the English should not do their own cooking, but send for French chefs. Like all Americans in England a long time, Aunt Tillie was a bigot about the rest of the world when it came to loving the English. They had no faults to her… they were the greatest people on earth. And she was one of them. Years later, T. S. Eliot, another Boston refugee, used to peddle the same sort of nonsense in a fake accent.… Mama was still very much of the idea that I should get an Eton jacket. I wanted a Beefeater's bearskin cap. Mama won.
Aunt Tillie dug into a rancid 'gator bag (that still had a few claws left on) and brought out a fragment of a card. “If you must buy, buy the best. Here is an address—Joe Plantaganet's shop. English tailoring at its best. Now if you want hats… or coal. No, you wouldn't want coal, would you, dear?”
Mama certainly didn't want coal. She looked quickly at the fragment of card. “I'll find it.”
“I'll go with you,” said Aunt Tillie, looking as if she wanted to make sure of getting her 5 per cent from Joe Plantaganet.
“No,” said Mama. “Stevie and I want to wander around London alone.”
“Well, dear, it's down past Victoria Embankment from Westminster Bridge, down to Blackfriars on the Thames, and.…”
“Thank you,” said Mama, taking my hand.
“Just say Tillie sent you… any place they know me.”
Mama bit her lip as if to keep back the words, “You bet they do,” and we went out. Aunt Fran was going to a hairdresser, Gramp was meeting an important beard at the Bank of Englan and Royal Exchange, and Mama and I were on our own in London.
“Frightened, Stevie?”
“No, Mama… but must I get an Eton suit?”
Just then a dray full of crates, pulled by two grey horses with the faces an rumps of German generals, banged past us, and the man with the whip stood up and howled at us.
“Blimmmmmey, wotbloodybusizzzzzness his thiss! Giiit hout, hiii siiy of the bloody — ooooooo… wiyyyyyyy!”
“What?” said Mama, but the dray went past in a clatter of hoofs, and we viewed the pendulous sagging plumpness of the rapidly departing German generals.
Mama shook her head, and we went up to a little red-faced man in a pot hat, who we knew was a bobbie from the steamship posters.
Mama said she wanted to find the Plantaganet place.
The Bobbie took off his hat and wipe the inside of it carefully… and peeped in as if the answer were printed in his hat.
“Now, ‘owww’s that… you sy Plan taganet, noww…? Now, lidy, that's a king's nime… ‘e’s dead… dea as all éell and 'Arry.”
“As who?”
“'Arry… Prince 'Al… 'Arry. 'Enry the Number 'e was, nowhhh? Was 'e hor was 'e not one of thimmmm Plantaganets?”
“Thank you,” said Mama. “'E wuz… I mean… I think he was.…”
And Mama took my hand and we went along, and we knew it was no use asking our way, since no one could speak English in London. Not even the side-walk artists peddling their tragic defeat, frustration, and impending ruin for copper coins.
We took a bus that seemed headed in our direction, we walked along the river, and twice we asked the way of passing natives. One man holding a closed umbrella winked at Mama as he said, “Que voulez-vous?” and a fat lady (eating a buttered roll at the curb) pointed to the river and said kindly, “Netter Fluss, 'nich?”
“Thank you,” said Mama, and we went that way, but got lost again; and so after a while we sat down in front of a little bookstore with cases full of yellow novels in the Tauchnitz editions… all marked “Not to Be Imported into Great Britain.”
“We're lost,” said Mama.
“Can I cry?” I asked. It always helped when you were lost to cry. It brought your plight to people's attention and was always good for free candy.
“No, Stevie, we'll find a telephone.” We tried several shops, but at last found that English phones were placed in the street in upright coffins. Mama and I got into a coffin, and Mama looked in dismay at the coins in her hand. She put one to a slot, but it fell out again, an she tried again and again until one was eventually swallowed by the phone, tasted, and kept.
A voice said, “Are you there?”
“Yes, I'm here!” said Mama, wondering at the question.
There was a small death on the wire. Then Mama said, “I want to call the Ormsbee Arms.”
“Half a mo',” said the voice. We stood and waited. The coffin was heated (English graveyards are very cold an soggy).
“What was that plice, please?”
“Ormsbee Arms… a hotel… Ormsbee Arms.”
“Oh, Hormsbee Harms… lodgin's. Why didn't ya say so, please?”
Twenty minutes later the porter of the hotel said he would see if he coul find “the lidy what wus with the Greenstreet party” in the lobby. Three coins later Mama was able to whisper into the phone to Aunt Fran that she was lost and would they please find her.… Aunt Fran said she would, and Mama said she was a dear, and they said they were both, dears, and Aunt Fran would find a cab and be right over. And Mama almost hung up… but Aunt Fran suddenly remembered something and asked, “Where are you?”
“In London, I think.”
“Street?”
I went and found out we were at Horsemongers' Lane and Hanging Swor Alley… or maybe it was the other way around… somehow it escapes me now.
I don't remember much more of what happened to Mama in London… one of those blank periods in my journal and memory. We must have seen all the ruins, visited most of the famous pictures, and I know we did finally get that Eton suit… although Aunt Tillie was never able to collect any part of her fee, since we didn't buy it at Joe's.
I do remember reading Mama's an Aunt Fran's German and French books, so that soon I could do their lessons for them… which was a help to them. Gramp was still in conference with a famous beard—something about building some railroads for the Tzar (but nothing came of it; in Switzerland there was a man named Lenin, and in a Serb village a youth was practicing to shoot an Archduke, using passing hens as targets).
Gramp was to stay in London for business, and Mama and Aunt Fran an I were to run over to Paris. I do remember that, and the big book that Gramp bought me—William Herndon's Natural History of the World. I still have it, and often read Gramp's and my own favorite passage:
“Let us take the loveless snail; for he is a hermaphrodite and in himself he is male and female; or rather there is no he or she among snails, and the snail knows nothing of love. So the snail lives the slow, simple, dull life of the snail kind. Nothing excites the passions, nothing demands any emotions; there is no need to rage or hurry. The snail lives to eat, to exist, to die… not to love.…”
Mama was so excited by the trip to Paris that when she came in and caught me reading of snails, she didn't even object. She didn't even object when Gramp came to say goodbye, and remarked he was happy we were going, because he was tired of seeing Westminster Abbey.…
“Now Gramp,” said Mama. “We join you in Austria.”
“Fine,” said Gramp. “And better leave before Tillie tries to sell you some bodies for medical study. She's become a business woman.”
It was raining when we got to Paris. There were no chestnut trees in blossom. We had a huge suite in a hotel near the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur… at least ten miles from it, but its dome was always at our window, and the heights above Montmartre.
Aunt Fran was in love with her London hairdresser, we found out. He ha sent a huge basket of fruit to the boat… and while Aunt Fran moaned an was sick on deck (“traveling by rail,” Gramp always said), I ate the fruit, an found a love letter in it which I gave to Aunt Fran, honorable little chap that I was. The hairdresser was even a worse speller than I was.
When we got to Paris, Mama said to Aunt Fran, “I don't understand you at all. You fall in love all the time.”
“I can't help it. It's my nature.”
“But what about that freight handler you're going to marry back in the States?”
“I don't know.…”
Mama shook her head. “These English… I don't know what kind of people they are. Here I expected you to meet an earl, or a kind rich man, or something, and you fall in love with a hairdresser! Even Aunt Tillie had better taste in her youth.”
“Eric wants to marry me!”
Mama put her finger to her mouth and rolled her eyes in my direction, an the talk stopped. So we went out an met Mr. Bloodbater in the lobby. Mr. Bloodbater was to be our guide in Paris. He was a bald little Englishman who hadn't been in England for twenty years. He guided Americans and old retire English officers through Paris… that is, those who didn't want to see the dives; Mr. Bloodbater was a gentleman from Oxford, and didn't show people thrills. He was best in the Tuileries, and among the artists of the cafés aroun the Place du Tertre, where he sold us fake Daumier lithographs.
At l'heure du cocktail he took us to the Café des Deux Magots to look at sunlit sinners. He would have nothing to do with vice after dark. And like all pretty women, Mama and Aunt Fran were stared at. French man power seemed to pass fifty years making lew gestures at passing strangers, instead of trying to save the nation. Mr. Blood-bater didn't like the French upper class very much, and he didn't like the French middle class very much, and his ideas on what was wrong with the bank an church groups were very interesting.
While Mama and Fran drank bocks and stared back coldly at the passing French manhood, poor Mr. Bloodbater had to address himself to me. I still have (marked down on the cover of my Natural History) his words about the coming trouble of the world:
“Is the world but a perpetual caricature of its own progress, a not very witty contradiction of what it thinks it is? Are pretense and hypocrisies always to soil our world…?”
“Have a bock, Mr. Bloodbater,” sai Mama… “Stevie is too young for deep thoughts.”
“To be sure,” said Mr. Bloodbater, and sank his face philosophically into a huge bock.
Aunt Fran finished a letter she was writing to her new love, and Mama folded her arms and shook her head an wondered what she was going to do with Aunt Fran. Mama loved Papa, and no other man existed for her. A wildbearded Frenchman came over an bowed to Mama, and Mama turned to me with great dignity and opened her guidebook and read the words of a French song:
“En avant, soldats chrétiens, En avant à la guerre…”
Mr. Bloodbater said, “An old French-Norman form of chant. Tenth Century.”
We were all impressed. That night on our way to dinner we walked into a group of Salvation Army singers… and they were singing, “En avant, soldats chrétiens…!”
Mama said to Mr. Bloodbater, “Why, it's Onward, Christian Soldiers!”
Mr. Bloodbater nodded. “Shows you how far back these folk tunes go. I'll order the dinner.”
“No, thank you,” said Mama. An Mr. Bloodbater saw that he had really lost face, and he buried his lost face in a lobster.
It was a huge lobster, “The size an color of a new-born child,” Mama sai… and she wouldn't have it.
She liked the look of something written as Merlans à la Pluche Verte on the menu. She had always liked veal, an she was not pleased when they put shirred whiting in front of us. But later Mama and I grew fond of the dish, an had it often back home… if Papa was in the mood to make it. (Mama was a dreadful cook.)
In a shirred egg dish, cook fresh whiting in white wine, real virgin oil (not the peanut or cottonseed “just as good” stuff), one clove of garlic, lemon juice, and one slice of red onion. When the liquid is almost all swallowed by the whiting, pour over it a sauce made of fish stock with sweet butter melted into it, flour, minced chives and parsley, an some more lemon juice.
Mama was getting bolder… she let Mr. Bloodbater order for her a white Margaux wine with the dish. The cork was the pride of my bottle cork collection for a long time.
A few days later, when I was beginning to see that there were no real citizens of Paris—only Provençals, Basques, Gascons, and Auvergnats—Aunt Fran came into the breakfast room of the hotel one morning and said brightly, “Guess what?”
“You've bought a hat,” said Mama. (Mama could cure anything by buying a hat… even scarlet fever.)
“Eric is coming to Paris! Just had a wire.”
“How nice,” said Mama, and stopped drinking what passes for coffee in French hotels.
“Can I have breakfast?” said Aunt Fran. “It's the first time I'm really hungry since getting off that channel boat. How sick I was!” (The smell of salt water taffy was enough to make Aunt Fran sick.…)
“How long is Eric staying in Paris?” asked Mama.
“Just three days… he's giving up hairdressing. He's got a surprise for me.”
“A two-headed sister,” said Mama… but I knew it was only Mama's way of showing she didn't think Eric's family could amount to much. Mama ha spent almost her whole life trying to get Aunt Fran to marry the right man. Aunt Fran had simple tastes in men. If a man had read a book, or graduate from high school, or had a good tailor, he wasn't for Aunt Fran. She really ha only to hear a broken rule of grammar, or see a blue shirt striped with green, or a broken nose, and she was in love with it and whatever man went with it. Mama could never understand why Aunt Fran was like that. After all, she use to say, they could match grandfathers with anybody (it was never really proved that he stole those horses, Gramp once happily remarked about Mama's grandfather).
Aunt Fran was very excited about Eric, and she went out to buy a new dress. Mama said she was expecting a headache and the mail from America, and she would stay in her room an brood for a little while. Mama's mama used to faint when faced with a problem, Mama brooded, and her granddaughter today throws things… progress of a sort, I suppose.
It was about three o'clock when the desk called up and said a Mr. Porter was on his way up. Mama said she didn't know any Mr. Porter, and the desk said in that case she should tell Mr. Porter that. The French hotel business was run on the idea that if you bowed to the customers and changed a tablecloth whenever they asked you to, you were running a genuine ‘òtel Americannnnnn.’
Mr. Porter, when I opened the door, turned out to be a young Englishman in naval uniform, with blond hair and very white, slim fingers.
“I'm Porter.”
“Yes,” said Mama. “There has been some mistake.”
“Eric Porter,” said the officer.
“The hairdr—” began Mama.
“Ex-hairdresser, you know. Been ordered into uniform. Naval reserve. Trouble brewing, you know.”
“I know,” said Mama.
“Expect war and all that.”
“I wasn't thinking of that.”
“The truth is, I'm ordered to Singapore… have three days. Want to marry Fran and take her out on the next P. and O. boat.”
“Oh.”
“Jolly, what?”
“Jolly,” said Mama, motioning Eric to sit down. Her brain was spinning… I could see that in the way she pushe back her hair and looked at the naval officer. “This is Stevie.”
“Pleased, I'm sure. Jolly honeymoon, you know—all the way to Injah by boat, lay over Ceylon for a week, then on by boat to Sing.…”
“All the way by water?”
“All the way.”
“Does it get rough?”
“Quite. A navy bride and all that, you know… part of the job.”
“Quite,” said Mama. “Fran is due back any minute. I'll leave you two alone. Tell her everything. Make it thrilling for her.”
“Quite,” said Eric, offering Mama his hand. They shook hands, and the poor boy didn't know he already wore a knife in his back.
“Yes.”
“Decent of you… very.”
There was a knock on the door, an a boy was there with a pile of bundles from the better shops. Fran would soon be up after them. Mama got her hat and took me by the arm. “I'll order tea for you two,” said Mama, “on my way out.”
Eric beamed. “Makes a chap feel tip-top, you know, you being so kind.” Mama nodded, and we went out. Aunt Fran was coming up the wide stairs (Louie the Twelfth's second-best staircase in Paris, I think), and Mama said, “You have company, hurry.”
We went out in the street and walke to a park, and Mama and I had our picture taken in French. The result looke just like a picture taken in English. A small square picture of me in my Eton suit holding a hoop (that was part of having your picture taken) and Mama leaning against a park gate. It's such a simple little picture on my wall that I simply can't understand why it doesn't show all the turmoil and the history of that afternoon.
When we got back to the hotel, Paris was just gathering itself for the evening. Men in bleu horizon pants, and top hats from the Almanach de Gotha… which propped up the missing leg on our hotel chair… and the little string ban playing—I can still hear them—Mendelssohn's Auf Flügeln des Gesanges. I had once spent a bitter two weeks on a piano struggling with that music. I would know it in hell… which was an idea.
The lights were not on in our suite, and we found Aunt Fran lying on the sofa, looking at the dark ceiling. She was not crying, and Mama put the lights on and Aunt Fran sat up and looked at us, and sniffed her tiny nose.
“When can we leave for Austria?”
“Soon, Fran.… What shall we do tonight?”
“Do ladies get drunk?”
“No,” said Mama, “but let's gamble. Remember what Gramp always said, ‘To the brave chemin de fer.’”
“It's a pun in English and French,” I said.
The tea of café au lait et croissants was untouched, so we three had it as it was. And then Mama and Aunt Fran “dressed up to nines,” as Mr. Blood-bater said, and he took them out to gamble. Aunt Fran proved that “unlucky in love, lucky in cards” wasn't so, and they ended up the evening “full of Joe de vivre,” as Aunt Fran put it.
Mama said she didn't get it, so Aunt Fran said it was a pun in American and French. Mr. Bloodbater later told me some of that evening; they really made a night of it.
The only thing, Mr. Bloodbater tol me the next day, that he could not understand was Mama's remarks to Aunt Fran after they had tried some Veuve Cliquot.
“Don't worry, Fran, honey… I hear the waiters in the Austrian Tyrol are crude and charming.”
They got in at two in the morning, the best of friends and sisters… an Mama never mentioned her war against the British again.…