The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [80]
near us, and she never forgave the French, because of Napoleon the Third. I was going to school in Brussels when she died." She corresponded with ladies of the nobility in different places. She exchanged recipes with a German woman who lived in Doom and had something to do with the Kaiser's household. "I was in Europe a few years ago and I saw this baroness. I knew her long. Of course they can never really accept you. I told her, 'I am really an American.' I brought some of my pickled watermelon. There is nothing like that over there, Augie. She taught me how to make veal kidneys with cognac. One of the rare dishes of the world. There's a restaurant now in New York that makes them. People have to make reservations, even now, in Depression time. She sold the recipe to a caterer for five hundred dollars. I would never do that. I go and cook it for my friends, but I would consider it beneath me to sell an old family secret." She could cook all right, she had all the cooking arcana. She was known all over for the dinners she threw. Or for those she cooked at other places, because she might decide to make one anywhere, for friends. Her social set were the hotel manager's wife at the Symington, the jewelers, Vietold, who sold to the carriage trade--the heaviest, crested, cymbal-sized fruit dishes and Argonaut gravy boats. There also was the widow of a man involved in the Teapot Dome Scandal, who bred coach dogs Any number of people like this. For new friends who didn't know her veal kidneys she'd prepare everything at home and cook it in at their table. She was an ardent feeder of people, and often cooked for the salesmen; she hated to see us go to restaurants, where everything, she said, in her impersonator's foreign voice that nothing could interrupt, was so cheap and sticky. That was just it, with Mrs. Renting--she couldn't be interrupted or stopped, in her pale-fire concentration. She would cook for you if she wanted to, feed you, coach, you, instruct you, play mah-jongg with you, and there was scarcely anything you could do about it, she had so much "lore force than anybody else around; with her light eyes and the pale, tox stain of her freckles lying in the dust of powder or on the back of faer hands, with long hard rays of the tendons. She told me I would study advertising in the School of Journalism at the University, and she paid my fees, and so I did. She also chose for me the other courses I needed for a degree, stressing that a cultured man could have anything he wanted in America for the asking, standing out, she said, like a candle in a coal mine. ^ I had a busy life. In my new person of which, at the time, I was ungodly proud. With my class evenings, evenings in the library reading history and the cunning books for creating discontent in the consumer; attending Mrs. Renling's bridge or mah-jongg soirees in her silk, penthouse parlor, something of a footman, something of a nephew, passing around candy dishes, opening ginger ale in the pantry, with my cigarette holder in my mouth, knowing, obliging, with hints of dalliance behind me, Sta-comb shining on my hair, flower blooming out of my lapel, smelling of heather lotion, snitching tips on what was what in behavior and protocol; till I found that much of this last was off the cuf E and that many looked to you to know what tone to take. The real touchstone was Mrs. Renting, who couldn't be denied leadership. Mr. Renting didn't seem to care and played his cards or ivories, truly detached and passionless. He didn't speak much, and Mrs. Ren Sing said what she was going to say without hearing other opinion. This other opinion, what was said about servants, or about unemployment or the government, was monstrous, no two ways about it. Renting knew this but he didn't care. These were his friends of the business community; a man in -business had to have such, and he visited and entertained but neither touched nor was touched, ever. He had a personality strictly relative to his business. Once in a while he'd take off to show his skill with a piece of rope in knot tying, or