MAMA had relatives in St. Louis. Family rumor was they had moved there with the invention of beer. This was not true, even in 1919, when Mama decided to visit them. They were brewers of beer and bottlers of beer and looked as if they drank a lot of it, but even I didn't think they invented it.
Gramp drove into St. Louis in our Model T on a windy day, and even after all these years I still remember how Gramp entered a town, muffled in his great driving coat, smoking a flaming torch of a cigar, going as fast as he could go, and looking over the town the way the Goths must have looked over the Sabine women near Rome in the early days of recorded history.
The Fosters, Mama's relatives. were not Sabines, they were highly respectable, very well off, and a little too sure they were the salt of the earth, the froth on the beer of the Middle West. There were several sets-of them, but the main root, the big tree, lived in a huge red house that looked almost like a Rhine castle, with white marble steps and bay windows almost as wide and protruding, Gramp said, as the stomachs of the family.
We drove up to the castle. A large Swedish housemaid let us in, and Gigi Foster came to greet Mama and kiss her. She was Mama's aunt; Mama's mother's sister, I got to understand after awhile. Aunt Gigi could sing opera in three languages, was the first woman, the first respectable woman, that is, to carry a cigarette case, and she looked down upon the beermakers of Milwaukee as Johnny Come Latelies.
She kissed Mama. “Sari! It's good to see you. And this is Stephen?”
“Stevie,” said Gramp. “Let's not get fancy. You look fine, Gigi. Been living high off the hog?”
Aunt Gigi ignored that part of Gramp's greeting, and we all shook hands and Gigi phoned Uncle Peter, who was at the brew house, to say that they had company. Mama was shown to her room, and she cried a little because she was staying on while I went on with Gramp to what we hoped would be California in Emma, our brass-bound car.
Mama said, “Now, take good care of Gramp; he's a very old man.”
“He's been west before—with Custer.”
“No, Stevie, Custer was scalped by Indians,”
“Wasn't Gramp?”
“No. he's been bald for years.”
It was the shattering of a cherished illusion, but I managed to overcome it, as I was hungry and the dinner gong was being struck below same place in the red brick castle.
Uncle Peter was a little round man with waxed mustaches who looked like a minor British general from some African war.
“Sari,” he said, kissing Mama, “that's a nice big boy you have there. He going into real estate like his father?”
Gramp swallowed a small glass of k?mmel and shook his head. “Hell, no, that's worse than being a great fiddle player. Stevie will be either an international tennis bum or a professional baseball player.”
Aunt Gigi said, “We don't use the word hell here of words like it.”
Gramp said, sotto voce, as we marched into the dining room, “How do they manage to carry on a conversation?”
Aunt Gigi and Uncle Peter had three sons and three daughters, and they all lived at home. There were some sons-in-law, some daughters-in-law, and some very fat, yellow grandchildren. They were all seated around a long heavy table as big as a skating rink. Three hired girls served dinner—Aunt Gigi thought butlers sinful. The silverware was heavy, and its handles ended in a nude woman of solid silver—but a respectable nude, she was mostly fish scales. The sons and daughters were overfed or perhaps overbeered: they were large and heavy and one could see they had red blood in them, and lots of it.
I shall try to give you some idea of the dinner, the average everyday dinner of a Middle West beer baron in the old days (they called it supper, of course, not dinner), but don't know if I can remember it all, I shall try. We had a dozen oysters on the half shell. A special silver merry-go-round contained the sauces, juices, spices, and horseradish that one bathed the oysters in. Uncle Peter had an extra half dozen. Then came lobster cocktails, with which we drank a white Rhine wine. Then came a huge silver coffin of piping-hot turtle soup, very green, and floating on it were slices of lemon. It tasted of good sherry. and the green turtle meat was cubed and just solid enough to give the full flavor of the turtle.
That ended the appetizer and fish courses, the opening guns of the battle. Little silver wagons on little silver wheels were placed on the table by the hired girls. The wagons contained rolls, buns, and hot breads with little seeds embedded in them, and china dishes held sweet country butter, not the cubed butter of the modern lean days, but butter from a rose-shaped mold, good yellow butter that never saw a store. It came from Uncle Peter's farm.
Mama and Gramp were looking at each other, watching the teeth and listening to the gullets of the beer family at play among the food. No one talked much except Uncle Peter, who told us about the shows in town and the number of show girls in them.
Then the soup was brought in; it was a rice soup, the rice mixed with beef, veal, pork, and spices, wrapped in cabbage leaves, and stewed in the soup, a sort of St. Louis version of golombki. This was followed by guinea hen en casserole à la d‘Al-buféra, served with noodles polonaise.
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