Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle ManLewis, Sinclair
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Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man
Lewis, Sinclair
Courtship -- Fiction; Love stories; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Middle-aged men -- United States -- Fiction
The Armenian restaurant is peculiar, for it has foreign food at low
prices, and is below Thirtieth Street, yet it has not become Bohemian.
Consequently it has no bad music and no crowd of persons from Missouri
whose women risk salvation for an evening by smoking cigarettes. Here
prosperous Oriental merchants, of mild natures and bandit faces, drink
semi-liquid Turkish coffee and discuss rugs and revolutions.
In fact, the place seemed so unartificial that Theresa, facing Mr.
Wrenn, was bored. And the menu was foreign without being Society
viands. It suggested rats’ tails and birds’ nests, she was quite sure.
She would gladly have experimented with _paté de foie gras_ or
alligator-pears, but what social prestige was there to be gained at the
factory by remarking that she “always did like _pahklava_”? Mr. Wrenn
did not see that she was glancing about discontentedly, for he was
delightedly listening to a lanky young man at the next table who was
remarking to his _vis-à-vis_, a pale slithey lady in black, with the
lines of a torpedo-boat: “Try some of the stuffed vine-leaves, child of
the angels, and some wheat _pilaf_ and some _bourma_. Your wheat
_pilaf_ is a comfortable food and cheering to the stomach of man.
Simply _won_-derful. As for the _bourma_, he is a merry beast, a brown
rose of pastry with honey cunningly secreted between his petals
and—Here! Waiter! Stuffed vine-leaves, wheat _p’laf, bourm’_—twice on
the order and hustle it.”
“When you get through listening to that man—he talks like a bar of
soap—tell me what there is on this bill of fare that’s safe to eat,”
snorted Theresa.
“I thought he was real funny,” insisted Mr. Wrenn…. “I’m sure you’ll
like _shish kebab_ and s—”
“_Shish kibub!_ Who ever heard of such a thing! Haven’t they any—oh, I
thought they’d have stuff they call ‘Turkish Delight’ and things like
that.”
“‘Turkish Delights’ is cigarettes, I think.”
“Well, I know it isn’t, because I read about it in a story in a
magazine. And they were eating it. On the terrace…. What is that _shish
kibub_?”
“_Kebab_…. It’s lamb roasted on skewers. I know you’ll like it.”
“Well, I’m not going to trust any heathens to cook my meat. I’ll take
some eggs and some of that—what was it the idiot was talking
about—_berma_?”
“_Bourma_…. That’s awful nice. With honey. And do try some of the
stuffed peppers and rice.”
“All right,” said Theresa, gloomily.
Somehow Mr. Wrenn wasn’t vastly transformed even by the possession of
the two thousand dollars her mother had reported. He was still “funny
and sort of scary,” not like the overpowering Southern gentlemen she
supposed she remembered. Also, she was hungry. She listened with stolid
glumness to Mr. Wrenn’s observation that that was “an awful big hat the
lady with the funny guy had on.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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