After all these years I can still sec and hear Mamie Beckman. Things like this you never forget; voices in other rooms go, faces once intimate and painful are gone, the real and true things. lived out in small rooms under low ceilings, fade, but I shall remember Mamie's voice as long as I live.
I expected Mama to freeze it all with a few well-picked-over words, but Mama was a spore, and Mama liked fun. Something in the big pressure play being pure on by Mamie appealed to Mama, and Mama was a great actress. She could play a scene any way she felt it. She slapped Mamie across her acres of behind, and put on the grin of a cow hand sunfishing a bronco at a big rodeo.
“Sure thing, Mamie,” said Mama in a tone of voice then being used by a young vaudeville actress named Mae West. “You show us the way.”
Gramp nodded, “We'll get the mail through to Russian Hill come Indian raid, flood, and fire. Or earthquake.”
Esme Beekman said softly, as she looked me over, “They don't admit it was an earthquake, just fire.”
“Take the little boy's. hand, Esme, and let's go.”
“Lay off,” I said. “Nobody holds my hand.”
“You bore me,” said Esme, taking my hand. We all went out and got into the big waiting car, and drove up more hills and down the oilier sides, past Chinese signboards and places smelling of tired fish, and along white houses with great big fat bay windows. Frisco is mad about bay windows, and they had the most I ever saw.
We stopped at last before a marble and gray stone house, and Mamie said, “Stanford White built it for Jake. I wanted Frank Lloyd Wright, but that Jake, he's a man you can't move much without TNT.”
The inside of the house was as gay as the outside, and that's pretty fancy if you know San Franciscans when it comes to spending money for houses, rooms, and walls.
“Let's dig in.” said Mamie. “Esme, show the little boy where he can wash his hands.”
Well, by that time I was in love with Esme, and instead of finding the place to wash my hands, Esme and I went behind the trees, and she showed me how to kiss girls. I had a general idea but no practice, and I made my first mistake. I liked it. I don't suppose 80] of us knows how simple it is to star a habit, but right then and there fell in love with women. I had good advice in my time. I remember Gramp once, when his gout was bad, talking a whole afternoon about love and worn en, and you would think all this from an expert would have saved me from a lot of trouble and turmoil and lamenting. But it didn't, In the end I remained, until my blood stream settled a foolish romantic, mistaking the illusion for the real) and the unreal fever of a moment for the facts of life.
“Now,” said Esme, “put your arm around me and say you adore me.”
“Why?”
“Why, my foot. Don't ask, just do it… say, 'I adore Esme.'”
“It sounds silly.”
“You you can say it in French if you want to,”
Well that seemed fair. So I said it in French. I may not have been an expert lover in my teens, but I could sound as daring as any Frenchman in the business. Mama found us after the French lesson and said I had to eat something and get back to the hotel and bed. It was a real spread. Waiters were marching around with flaming skewers of kebab, marinated lamb, and plates of rice pilaf seasoned with almonds, pine nuts, and baked tomatoes. Tables were set with plates of guinea hen Vbronique style, in sauterne with white grapes. 'The lobster, as usual in Frisco, was there, done fra diavolo, and for those who liked it (Gramp did), squid, calamai, luciano,
I list all this from Mama's letters and Gramp's journal to show that Americans, some of them anyway, around the start of the century and from then on, were eating the spécialisés of real hause cuisine. And that, besides killing the buffalo and Sitting Bull and building railroads, we were also a nation that had among it people who were diners par excellence. Somehow you will not find much of this in our literature, and even the little that seeps in is written of with a note of being ashamed of good living. I have tried in this series to show that the good life existed even among the sunburned oil and lumber and mine kings of the just-ended West. I must have eaten a lot. I missed the Anjou vintages Mamie had opened. But I did get some Champigny spilled on my second-best pants, and by then Mama was for taking us back to the hotel.
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