It's hardly worth listing the rest of the meal. Ice cream and apricot sauce, a cherry flan, and of course coffee in huge blue cups, a coffee powerful enough to wake the dead. By this time the family was warm and glowing, breathing a little hard, but game. Gramp looked at me, I looked back and said I wanted to unswallow, and Gramp said he would take me out. Mama looked at us as if to say. “Why didn't I think of that?”
Up in our room Gramp shook his head. “Damn me, where do they put it all?”
I moaned, “Maybe they have hollow legs, Gramp.”
“They're all digging their graves, scooping ‘em out with a roasting pan.”
At which point Uncle Peter came up with a ballon of brandy for Gramp and a lump of sugar in it for me.
We were only waiting to get Mama set with the relatives, then Gramp and I were to go on—a good thing, too. The family never let up on their eating. At dawn the buffet tables started steaming and boiling, and silver pots of tidbits—tongues, bacons, delicate organs, and fish—were all ready at breakfast. Everyone picked up a plate and moved back and forth from buffet and table between mounds of scrambled eggs, small ham steaks, and urns of that strong coffee. Lunch was a mere hasty attack on chicken in the pot Mallorquin, big pies dripping their berry blood on white plates, fish planked and decorated with aspics and carrot carvings, some jugged eels, a whole side of roast beef, a few ribs of lamb, a big cheesecake, and little cakes with pink icings.
Uncle Peter himself, carrying two huge oilcloth shopping bags, used to go to the market down near the river front. There a one-armed ex soldier ran a shop where the fish of the Gulf were brought in on beds of ice, where big barrels held oysters and clams, where the local hams and bacons, really wood smoked by the natives, were to be found black and sinister, but showing a pale pink meat when cut.
Old Sam, the owner, would fill Uncle Peter's shopping bags very full and then rub the stump of his arm (lost at the first Bull Run) and say, “Got some real French olive oil … some Maine lobsters coming in on ice this afternoon … let you have two dozen squab pigeons—they broil up nice.”
Uncle Peter would nod. “Yes, very nice à la crapaudine, halved, buttered, and grilled. Any well-hung Rock Cornish grouse? What about those New Orleans prawns you promised?”
“Boat hit a sand bar down river. Let you have some smoked cod roe pâté and half a crate of Dungeness crabs from the Columbia …”
And home we would go, carrying our shopping bags … crabs clashing and spitting white and blue in the basket I was carrying.
Of course, it wasn't all eating. Uncle Peter was a man who liked the theatre.
After dinner Uncle Peter would par his stomach as if to say, “See how good I am to you?” and look at Gramp. “New show in town, suppose we take it in?”
Mama said, “Fine, I've been home all day helping Gigi unpack the winter silver.”
Aunt Gigi shook her head. “Now, Sari, the women here don't go to that kind of show Peter and his friends go to. Girly shows they're called.”
“I don't mind,” said Mama brightly.
Aunt Gigi made a small circle of her mouth, as if she were sucking a lemon. “I know, dear, but we are a family that doesn't like talk. To the men it doesn't matter. All men are …” and she went on telling Mama what all men are and how they can't help it.
I remember some of the shows Uncle Peter look us to. I guess they felt I was a man, and in 1919 I was twelve, but we matured early in those days.
The shows were all “Direct from Broadway with the Original Cast.” But as Uncle Peter said he knew the girls in them and had known them for years. somehow the boast of the posters didn't ring true. They were all about losing somebody's garter and trying to get it back, about being locked up in a Turkish bath on ladies’night, about two bedrooms with one door, about people who mistook somebody else for their wife, about wedding nights and honeymoons that somehow were always confused. Very daring, I suppose, but except for the girls who had shrill voices and lace nightgowns and the comic maids and drinking butlers and jokes about missing love letters, it didn't make much sense.
We used to go backstage and watch the girls make up. and Uncle Peter would pinch their chins and invite them to parties at the beer plant for his sales conventions. He usually had one party a month, after which Aunt Gigi wouldn't Speak to him for a few days. I wasn't invited, but Gramp was. I remember Mama wanted to go but was told respectable women never went to Uncle Peter's conventions, and Mama said, “What the h—living in St. Louis is like living in a nunnery.” But she didn't say it where Aunt Gigi could hear it.
I remember Uncle Peter and Gramp coming home late one night from a convention and something fell down the stairs. It turned out to be a Greek work of art, pure marble, of a nude boy pulling a thorn from his foot. And the next day Aunt Gigi and Mama didn't speak to Uncle Peter or to Gramp, but the men had headaches anyway and didn't cat much dinner—which was a shame. as it was as big as ever, featuring, I remember, stuffed turkey roll, poupeton de dindon, with truffles and sweetbreads. But the men just weren't hungry.
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