The author’s childhood home in St. Louis, Missouri.
Blame it on the Agatha Christie novels, my mother said.
It was her fascination with the grand homes featured in the famous British crime novels that led my parents to move our family from a modest house on a cul-de-sac to a crumbling Georgian brick mansion in one of St. Louis’s oldest neighborhoods. The move was as aspirational as it was impractical. My mother had grown up in the genteel poverty befitting the granddaughter of two Lutheran ministers; later, her father had risen from bank clerk to bank president, affording the family a small Cape Cod-style house in a middle–class suburb. My father’s childhood poverty was of the more abject version: his father had only an eighth grade education, and had supported the family through odd jobs before finding success as a used-car salesman.
But that was all in the past, as my father, the first in his family to graduate from college, went on to success as a corporate lawyer, and now, to this grand house, built in 1914, with its wood paneled library and its servants bells connecting every room. We were only a family of four, my father, mother, brother and I, and we rattled around the eight bedrooms, unsure where to land in this new house – this new world, of hand-painted antique Zuber wallpaper and crystal chandeliers.
Until my father decided it was time to make his ribs.
Making ribs for my father was not an act of cooking as much as an act of faith. Passed down by generations, his method was precise and immutable, starting with the grill itself. He took cinderblocks and stacked them, two bricks high, in a u-shape. He then topped the cinderblocks with a metal rack he had purchased one summer from a neighbor of the A-frame, mustard-colored house we had owned on the Lake of the Ozarks in southern Missouri. Under the rack went a pile of supermarket charcoal, which burned all day as the ribs slow-cooked, basted with a sauce of tomato and 7-Up.
Undeterred by our fancier surroundings, my Dad decided it was time to resurrect the grill, this time in the driveway of our new home, between the former servant’s entrance and the detached three-car garage with its chauffeur apartment. He decided to invite over a smattering of family and friends. Out came the cinderblocks and the metal rack. With his charcoal lit and his folding chair beside it, my father nursed a Budweiser beer all day as the ribs smoked, basting them every few hours.
Guests arrived, many seeing the house for the first time. Obligatory tours were given, mouths agape at the size of the half-furnished rooms. And my Dad served his ribs: St. Louis-style, slow-cooked, falling off the bone and smothered in sauce.
Inevitably, my brother and I left for college, and my parents sold the house, saying goodbye to its 10,000 square feet in favor of a far more sensible home for two. The cinderblocks and grill moved with them, but in time, my father, his family grown, moved on to a more conventional Webber, the cherished rack given away.
And the years pass. I live on the East Coast now, and my parents in Florida. Only my brother stayed in St. Louis, and the memories of our mother’s Agatha Christie dreams fade. My brother still makes my dad’s ribs, successfully, and I try, less successfully. My own children, Connecticut-born and raised, have never tasted ribs that have cooked all day in the hot midwestern sun.
But for one moment in time, on a canopied brick terrace behind a house too big for any twentieth-century family, let alone the likes of us, we enjoyed my dad’s ribs on a humid St. Louis night. What remains, beyond the memories, is a driveway scarred black, in the outline of cinderblocks.
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