The past recaptured,” said Proust … nothing has happened to you that you can't remember. And I have just come from New Orleans, and the things I remember best are the wonderful eating places that I visited with the old man in 1919 and 1920, those years when Gramp and his Model T Ford were eating up the dust on the American highways of the period, and we decided— Gramp, Mama, and myself—to try to reach California by car!
It all came back to me in New Orleans. Count Arnaud's on Bienville Street—I remember Gramp talking about the opening in 1920. “Hell and high water, boy, what an opening night! The Count smelling of the best brandy and all of us testing the food of Madame Pierre. What a man was Arnaud Cazenave! Those dishes: Arnaud sauce on the shrimp, suprême de volaille en papillote—and don't say it's just chicken and white wine cooked in paper. Oysters Bienville, and at the end monts d'amour Rosalinde … The country is going to hell in a hack, Stevie, they don't feed themselves like that any more!”
Maybe, Gramp, but I had dinner at Arnaud's just last week with two beautiful ladies, Germaine Cazenave Wells, the Count's daughter, and Montez Tjaden. And Gramp, they were still serving filet de truise Vendôme, that claret wine with trout, and pineapple flambée. And in the flames of the last we toasted you and the Count.
And one other place, Gramp, we ate at on that great trip is there: the famous Commander's Palace. I bought my companion a nine-dollar flower, and we went and had the stuffed flounder and the turtle soup with lemon slices, and I remembered us again in 1919, you smoking your big cigar and me, knee high to the big bottle of champagne. They burned down the Commander's Palace a couple of times but they always rebuilt it, and it stands today, again, in the form and flavor you and I enjoyed so long ago …
It was 1919, we had just ended wars forever, it seemed, and Gramp came home one spring day and banged his cane against the Chinese gong in the hallway. “I've done it. I bought a stinking motor car!”
“They explode,” said Mama.
“Just had my first lesson. Destroyed a valuable tree and part of a garden wall, but I tell you this is the age of speed. Did twenty-two miles an hour.”
Uncle Willie was living with us then; he was between colleges. “Why don't you get a Stutz Bearcat? They're really something.”
Gramp scowled. “Nobody is going to get me to lie down on my back to drive a car.”
The Bearcat was a low car. Mama said. “Did it cost much?”
Gramp grinned and beat me playfully on the rear with the flat of his cigar case. “I've sold the horses, sold the carriage. We travel in style from now on!”
“Not I,” said Mama, who was watching her grammar that day.
Gramp winked at me. “I'm going to California by car. I'm taking Stevie, room for one more and the baggage. You always wanted CO visit relatives in St. Louie, Sari.”
Mama perked up and smiled her best smile. “Can't we go by train?”
“As well go by covered wagon! It's a new age, Sari, a new world. Didn't we just whip the Germans, save the French and English, bury the Tzar, and begin to import a Chablis Burgundy? It's the twentieth century, gal!”
Mama gave in with grace; she had a new fur coat and she wanted to test it on the eyes of the relatives in St. Louie (we never said St. Louis—just St. Louie).
The next morning there was the sound of braying in front of the house, and I ran out, buttoning as I went, and there in front of the while marble stepping stone labeled LONGSTREET was a shiny, brassy, square (and ugly) motor car. It was black and solid-looking, stood like a barn, and the brasswork. of which there was much, out-rivaled the feeble spring sun of a New York day. Behind the wheel sat a man wrapped in a brown duster, with a cap on backwards and huge goggles Strapped across a big nose. A cigar smoldered and spat fire, and the figure pumped air into a rubber ball, and the mooing sound came out and filled the street. The 1919 Ford was 1 product to dazzle the eye and numb the mind (it also did things to the rear of man's anatomy, as I found out).
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