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.
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.
Mama said, “How about taking a drive along the river front tonight?”
“It's not the place to be seen after dark,” said Aunt Gigi.
I felt sorry for Mama to be left here among all these sets of active teeth eating their way through mountains of food while Gramp and I climbed the Rockies and beyond in our Model T. But as Mama said that night, “It's a man's world, baby boy, a man's world, so you just be good and blow your nose often and don't let Gramp punish his liver (code words meaning “don't let him drink too much”) and write me every day.”
I said, “Of course, Mama,” and I kissed her because I loved her very much and I would miss her.
Uncle Peter wanted to give us a big send-off, roast half a deer, plank a river fish on an oak door or something like that, but Gramp begged off.
“You see, Pete, we're not used to eating so much.”
“It's nothing, old boy. Wish I had some bear steak for you.”
“Never mind; too old to digest bear.”
Aunt Gigi said to Gramp, “Tell Peter we have a bear ham left in the Spring-house on the farm.” Aunt Gigi wasn't speaking to Uncle Peter. It seems he had given one of the girls in a show a pair of garters with small diamonds on them spelling out “Rhine Beer and Lager” and she showed them every night on the stage on a pair of well-filled black silk stockings. Uncle Peter called it advertising, but Aunt Gigi called it—well, let's skip it, maybe she didn't mean it.
“Tell Gigi,” Uncle Peter said, “we ate that bear ham last Thanksgiving.” When they weren't speaking, they spoke across each other.
“Hmmm,” said Aunt Gigi, “I'm sure I never ate a drop or shred of it, but I'm Sure the girls at the St. Louis Fun House and Ballet did.”
Uncle Peter threw up his hands in despair. He did leave two bottles of Hennessy cognac in the car for us. “Medicine,” he said. “Take it for colds, chills, and damp. Never fails.”
Gramp agreed; said he preferred it to doctors. Mama kissed us both, and we said we hoped she would have a good time. We had to go downtown to get some spark plugs and then go to the express office to pick up a new tire being shipped out to us. Then, off to California, with some Hennessy on our knee.
We were missing a big dinner and we were happy about it. Minced lobster tails, jambon en croûte, shashlik caucasien, and pompano sauté meunière.
As we were driving to get our spark plugs, Gramp said. “I kind of feel bad leaving Sari in that nest of heavy feeders.”
“They're her relatives.”
“That's no excuse.”
“Was the convention fun, Gramp?”
Gramp looked at me, then looked away and played with the steering wheel, missing a trolley car by a thin hair. “The older you grow, Stevie, the quicker you'll learn it's all a dream, a bubble, and a snare. Don't be romantic about women, Stevie, like your Uncle Peter, and don't be a cynic like your grandfather. The romantics find women unfaithful, and the cynics sec their shabby little souls that would sell a man out for a place to park their big feet.”
“How shall I treat women. Gramp?” I asked. I wanted to know because one never knew what the future would hold.
“Treat 'em often.” Gramp said. “That's the best advice I can give you, and avoid meeting any like your Aunt Gigi. Avoid at all times women who are sad and a little mad in the head and those who say they adore you and then tell you how much they give and some-how never remember how much they take. But. hell, boy, you've still a year or two before you're ready to tell some-thing on long legs she's the greatest thing since Helen of Troy.”
Looking back. I guess Gramp and my Uncle Peter led a hard life, full of adventures that didn't always end neatly and romantically. I don't know if Cramp's advice ever really helped me. But that's another story, as Mr. Kipling used to say.
We finally picked up the spark plugs and then crossed town to the express office to pick up our tires. And there in the express office, next to a crate of ducks, stood Mama, her bags at her feet!
“What the h—,” said Gramp. “Damn me. Sari, they throw you out?”
“I ran away.” said Mama, kissing me on the top of the head. “I couldn't take it any more.”
“What will they think?”
“I don't care. I'm coming with you.”
Gramp grinned and lit the first cigar of the day. “Well, Sari, I don't say I blame you. I like fat women, but not as fat as you would have gotten there in a few weeks.”
“Besides,” said Mama, “Aunt Gigi didn't believe in doing anything but retaining her social position.”
“She's got a big one, too,” said Gramp, winking. “A beaut.”
We got the tire and strapped it on and started west and kept going. Mama was very happy and didn't say any more how much the car shook and how bad the gasoline smelted. Mama was a sport and liked life and excitement, and I guess that was why Gramp liked her better than any of the other daughters-in-law.
That night Mama showed us Uncle Peter's gift to her, and I wish I knew where it is now. A pair of garters set with small diamonds that spelled out “Rhine Beer and Lager” must be worth a nice dollar these days.