I never see San Francisco without getting a bang out of the hills wrapped in mist, the houses clinging to their steep sides, the gray-silver skies, the sweep of sea on the Golden Gate. It's like no other city I've ever seen, and yet it stands like part of a culture that is the East and that is Europe. It's like nothing else in California, certainly not the daffy pace and the fruitcake complexion of Los Angeles and the lesser breeds in Brentwood and points south.
I can remember that day in 1919 when Gramp, Mama, and myself, in our trusty Studebaker, came to the Oakland ferry station and looked across at the city of San Francisco. It was a few days before Christmas, and we looked across the lead-colored bay at the populated hills, the fog already dancing on the rooftops, and the deep green of pine trees clinging to one shaggy hill; and over it all the guttural gawk of sea gulls, shoplifting along the water front.
“Big bastard,” I said, copying Cramp's Army talk.
“Don't point,” Gramp said. “Yes, it's a fine place. Let's get on the ferry and get going.”
Mama shivered and wrapped herself in Gramp's bearskin coat. “Hot water is what I need, lots of it, and good soap and crisp clean towels.”
“Now, Sari, let's remember we promised to get in touch with Mrs, Jake Beekman.”
“People,” said Mama, as we drove onto the ferry, “get in the way too much when we want to see a country.”
“Don't talk as if this isn't America, Sari.”
“How's your gout this morning?” Mama asked.
Gramp snorted, blew wind through his mustache, and looked at Mama as if trying to see the secret, cunning corners of her mind. Cramp's gout had been real bad, and his big toes were still hurting him. But he knew it was his own fault, and he didn't need Mama to remind him of it. But she did when she wanted to make a point against Gramp.
“My gout, damn it, is fine; it's doing great on every toe I have. It's a family gift, like long noses and gray eyes. Stevie will get it in time, so don't gloat at an old man sinking away.”
The ferry was running in the shreds of mist, and the harbor horns were making sounds deep in their throats, and everything was dotted with wet spots of water; this is the best climate yon will find in Frisco, when the weather is what the natives call good.
Mama said, “Don't beg for pity, Gramp. Where are we staying?”
“The Palace Hotel. It isn't what it once was, but in its day it was mighty fine, the best thing here besides the Barbary Coast.”
“Can't we stay at a modern place?” Mama asked, showing that even in 1919 people threw the word modern around like a loose shoe.
Gramp lit a fresh stogie as the ferry clanked into its slip. The gate came up. the horses started to clatter off (in those days the wagon was the solid truth in transportation), and Gramp followed, the car growling with power and fury.
“Think Stude will lake the hills.'” I asked.
“We'll find out,” said Gramp. And we shot into traffic and took the highest, steepest hill I had ever seen close up. It was just a city street-standing on end-but Stude just purred and shifted gears and took it like it was a walk in a country garden. Mama turned a little green and said, “I feel ill.”
Gramp said, “It's the height. Breathe through your nose, and watch nut for eagles. Up this high they can carry off a full-grown woman.”
But there weren't any eagles, and while I was glad that Mama wasn't carried off by one, still it would have been exciting. Of course, any eagle that got Mama in his claws was in trouble. Mama wasn't much over five feet, and the most beautiful strawberry-blonde in America (it's no secret she was one of Charles Gibson's models and one of the first “Gibson Girls”), but Mama was a fighter-she had to be, with Gramp running the family and Papa a fashionable failure in the real estate business.
The Palace Hotel was big, impressive, and old, with solid marble columns, and crystal hanging from the ceiling. The rooms were big, the beds tall, and from the window you could see almost more of San Francisco than you could consume. The room was full of flowers, candy boxes tied in red ribbons, a basket filled with stuffed olives, smoked hams, bors-d'oeure in glass, bottled turtle soup, and a whole pièce montée of lobster en gelée.
Mama said, “They've put us in the kitchen!”
Gramp read a card on the baskets. “Hell, no, it's from Mamie Beckman. 'Welcome to our city.'”
“And eat hearty,” said Mama, taking the pins out of her riding hat. “She must think we're starving Balis or something.”
I clawed up a bunch of hothouse grapes, and Mama took them away from me. “Baby boy mustn't fill his stomach before lunch.”
Gramp slipped the aged bellboy a dollar and said, “Put this truck in storage and clear the way to the dining room; we're roaring down to lunch.”
The bellboy looked at Gramp, then at the dollar, and stood aside and held the door open for us. The headwaiter bowed as we tame into the dining room. A band was playing, and a sad little man was sawing Viennese music on a string bass.
“Mrs. Beekman has asked me to give you her table.”
“Damn white of her,” said Gramp, “but we'll use our own.”
The headwaiter looked up over his head, where heaven must have been, and said, “This is the only free table. You'll like it.”
We sat down, Gramp's big toe hurting, and Mima said, “May we see the menu?”
The headwaiter motioned to some of his staff. “Mrs. Beekman has ordered for you. She felt that after your trip you would be tired, and the food here is of the best.” Gramp was going to protest, but Mama, acting very grand, looked At him, and then at the waiter. “We don't know any Mrs. Beckman, and if you don't mind, we have minds and will use them. That is, if you have a chef here who can cook.”
The headwaiter bowed and stood a defeated man. Mama doesn't ever miss when she brings up the big guns of her scorn. Gramp nodded and sat silent, and Mama ordered the way Gramp had taught her. Hot shrimp victimise en casserole with wine sauce and dill, and bedded in rice; pea soup with sherry; veal cooked in sour cream, bedded in Nockerl and paprika; and to start it all hors-d'oeuvre with celery root remoulade and French sardines. “And some Nuits-St..Georges and Napa Gamay Rosé. Black coffee.
We had a dessert of baba au rhum flambé, and then Gramp and I went for a walk around, while Mama went up to rest. Being small, she couldn't take on a load of food and carry it around right after a meal. At the door the man in the Swiss Naval uniform said that Mrs. Beckman's Lincoln was waiting, and I fear Gramp told him what to do with it. (It didn't seem it could be done, and 1 would have liked to watch.) Gramp hurried me off to show me the remains of the Barbary Coast.
But, of course, our luck couldn't hold. We were dressing for dinner when the phone rang and someone said something very fast that we couldn't hear very well, and three minutes later there was a knock at the door. There stood a large pretty woman, built along the lines of the original Ark, and a very pretty little girl of twelve, with an upturned nose and cruel eyes. The Ark came in fast, talking fast too, and moved among us with skill and speed, kissing, handshaking, and pressing us close to a bosom heavily scented with chemical violets.
“Ah, the Longstrasses at last, at last! Mamie is the name. Mamie Beckman, but you just call me Mamie, and call me often. Jake said you'd be in Frisco, but that husband of mine, try and get him away from the ranch. Well, welcome to Frisco. Welcome to the real city in the real West. Don't bother dressing, I'm giving a party on the top of Russian Hill, and this is my daughter Esme. Esme, kiss the little boy and stop pulling on your dress. General, it's good to see you. Well, let's roll, time's fleein' and the band is playing Dixie.”
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.
Mamie said to me, “So you and Esme are going to get married?”
“So we think,” I said. “In about ten years.”
(“He is a sweet little boy,” said Mamie.
Which didn't seem the way to talk about a future son-in-law.
On the way to the hotel Mama said, “So baby boy is leaving the nest?”
Gramp, taking off his shoes to rub his big toes, said, “I hope he makes all the mistakes I made with women. looking back, only the mistakes seem to have been fun.”
Looking back now, I can see I never had the wideness, the deepness, to make all of Cramp's mistakes. But of the little I tried-it has been fun at chat.