The Summer Invitation (18 page)

22

Nice to Have Known You

I was still thinking about Alexander kissing me—trying to remember it—when we got back to the party and Clover asked Val and me to step away and have a private talk in our bedroom.

“Sit down,” she said, closing the door behind her. We sat down on our little
Madeline
beds. Then Clover sat down on my bed too and squeezed my hand.

Valentine was impatient to get back to the party. She gestured to her empty glass. She was thirsty, she said.

“Girls…” said Clover, and paused.

“What is it?” whined Valentine. And although I wouldn’t have spoken to Clover that way under any circumstances, I was getting impatient too, because I only had thoughts for Alexander.

“I’m going to put this plainly. Something terrible has happened. I just found out over the phone, while you were out getting ice, Franny. Well—this is it. What I have to tell you. Aunt Theo died.”

“Died?”
echoed Valentine, her mouth a perfect O. Then before I knew it, she was crying. It was only now that I noticed there were faint tears on Clover’s lashes. She must have tried to wash them away before telling us the news.

“What? When?” I asked.

“In Germany. She was still in Germany apparently. She never did get on the plane. Oh, it sounds like it was very peaceful! She was in her bed at home. She always made sure she had a beautiful bed. She always had all of these velvet pillows…” And at the mention of the velvet pillows now Clover was crying too, and had gone over to Valentine’s bed to give her a hug.

“Had she been sick a long time?” I wanted to know, still taking it in.

“Yes actually, though she didn’t want me to tell you girls or your parents either—she didn’t want to let on.”

“
Dead
,” Valentine repeated, “she’s
dead
,” just to be as dramatic as possible. Clover reached out and patted her head.

“I guess this won’t be so much of a
Getting to Know You
party after all,” Clover managed to say between her tears. I wasn’t crying yet, and I wondered why that should be; I wondered if other people would be looking at me, wondering why I wasn’t. Thinking I was heartless, maybe. But it wasn’t that I was heartless. It wasn’t that at all. Valentine and I had never been close to anybody who had died before, and the funny thing was that even though I had never actually met Aunt Theo in real life, I
did
feel close to her. I was confident that I had felt closer to her than Valentine, even though she was the one who was sobbing while I was sitting there on my
Madeline
bed perfectly still.

Clover went on: “I did so want for Aunt Theo to get to meet you and Valentine. But, otherwise, I thought of it more as a
Nice to Have Known You
party, if you see what I mean. Goodbye, farewell—oh, the point of having this party was to bring all of Aunt Theo’s friends back together one last time! She’d been resting up all summer long, hoping that she would be well enough to come to New York in August. The last time I spoke to her was just two days ago, in fact. She sounded quite well, I had no idea it was so near the end. But now I wonder—I wonder, Franny. That was just like Aunt Theo. She always believed in acting all chin up, even at the worst of times.”

Clover decided that everybody should know what had happened. Why keep it from Aunt Theo’s friends, when so many of them were right there? Before she did this, Clover went and “consulted,” as she put it, with Cousin Honor. She said that was because Cousin Honor was the only blood relative of Aunt Theo’s there. The two of them agreed it would be best to go ahead and break the news to the group. Afterward there were tears and toasts. Cousin Honor chimed in, saying that we were to “open another bottle of champagne if you please and carry on.”

“Carry on doing
what
?” demanded Valentine.

“Why,” said Cousin Honor bravely, though there were tears in her eyes as well, “for instance we could do the tango!”

“The tango?”
Valentine repeated.

Cousin Honor was small, but she reminded me somehow of a queen. She just had
that air.
(“Imperious,” Ellery whispered to me. “Honor was always imperious. Just like her cousin Theo.”) I watched her, fascinated. Clover and I exchanged glances, wondering if she actually could be serious about us doing the tango at a time like this. Turned out, she was.

“Warren?” she said grandly, putting her hand out to him and leading him in the first dance. Clover shrugged and went to search for some appropriate music to put on among Aunt Theo’s old records.

At Cousin Honor’s prompting, Alexander and I even tried to do the tango together, though we were not very good at it, either of us. And we were blushing the whole time.

Meanwhile, Valentine did the tango with Laurent Victoire, the auburn-haired Frenchman, who selected her as his dancing partner especially, and who, unlike Alexander and me, turned out to be very, very good at it. By the end of it, Valentine was pretty good at it too, though she did keep bursting into tears every now and then and exclaiming
“Dead, s
he’s
dead,”
as if anyone could have forgotten. It wasn’t that we had forgotten. It’s that we were trying to do what Aunt Theo would have wanted: not to let on. To act chin up, even at the worst of times.

23

That Was the Summer When

Here is Aunt Theo’s obituary, which Mom and Dad clipped for us from
The New York Times.
We read it once we were back home in San Francisco, just a couple of days after the night of the party where we supposed to get to finally meet her.

T
HEODORA
“T
HEO
” W
ENTWORTH
W
HITIN
B
ELL
D
IES AT
65;

R
ADCLIFFE
B
EAUTY,
A
VEDON
M
ODEL
& N
OVELIST

T
HEODORA
“T
HEO
” W
ENTWORTH
W
HITIN
B
ELL
, a swan-necked Radcliffe beauty, Avedon model, one-time novelist, and legendary free spirit, died in Germany after a long illness. She was sixty-five.

Ms. Bell (despite countless admirers, she never married) was born in Boston to the famous Bell clan, in a five-story brownstone facing the Vincent Club, to Abbott Wentworth Ford Bell and Victoria Pendleton Theale Whitin. Her ancestors on both sides were painted by John Singer Sargent, and it was said that Ms. Bell’s tall, dark chiseled beauty suggested the elegance of another era.

She first made a reputation for being rebellious by getting kicked out of Miss Wilcox’s Academy for Girls in the tenth grade; she refused to show sufficient team spirit during volleyball practice, and encouraged other girls to follow her example. She was admitted to Radcliffe several years later, only to have
Esquire
magazine vote her “the most sought after date in the Ivy League.” She was also on the cover of
Mademoiselle
’s “College Girl” issue in 1962. After Radcliffe she was a runway model in Paris. Later on when she moved back to New York she modeled for Richard Avedon. In his series of photographs of her she wears a floor-length black velvet gown and has a stuffed swan perched on her shoulder. The late sixties took her to Hollywood, where she had bit parts in several notable movies of the period.

Some of these adventures appear in her highly autobiographical novel,
Made in Paris
(Random House, 1972).

In more recent years, Ms. Bell kept residences in Greenwich Village, Paris, and Sag Harbor, NY. She was a plucky world traveler and charmed flocks of friends and admirers on two continents. Her witty letters and slashing black handwriting were legendary among her correspondents. “One always looked forward to receiving her letters,” said Ellery Jones, a longtime friend of Ms. Bell’s and a New York City gossip columnist. “Her writing style was absolutely delicious.”

Longtime New Yorkers may recall Ms. Bell as that tall, striking, dark woman who used to conduct tango lessons every Wednesday afternoon in front of the angel at the Besthesda Fountain in Central Park. Her signature outfit when doing the tango was a black chiffon dress and red satin ballet pumps, from the French fashion house Lanvin.

Ms. Bell leaves numerous cousins on both the Bell and Whitin sides, but is survived by no children.

“So that explains why we all did the tango that night!” exclaimed Valentine on reading this.

“The tango?” repeated Mom and Dad. “You actually did the tango?”

“Why yes, let me show you,” said Valentine, and struck a Spanish-style pose.

A couple of months after this, I got a package from Clover.

Dear Franny,

Now that Theo’s dead, maybe you’ll know why I agreed to meet Digby for that foolish sentimental lunch at the Oyster Bar last summer. I’ll tell you: because I knew that Theo was dying and he was a link to what remained of my girlhood, my past. (Which is also why I was
such a wreck
when Carlo my little turtle died, if you remember. Weeping over a turtle at MY advanced age!) Now, I’m afraid, nothing remains of my past all. But I’m so happy to have my memories of you and Valentine this past summer. I told you girls once that there will always be “one summer” you’ll remember. Now I have two!

I hope you find the enclosed pretty. I made it just for you, Franny, with your own style of beauty in mind.

All my love,

Clover

Inside the package there was a dear little box, two bluish-pink oyster shells with a tiny gold hinge. A jewelry box! How sweet of Clover. All my life I hoped to be able to look at it and think to myself those ravishing words:
That was the summer when—

Epilogue

Boucher’s Seasons

Three years later I’m visiting New York City again.

Now, at seventeen, I’ve come East to look at schools; my first choice is Sarah Lawrence. I thought of going to Bennington, like Clover, but I just don’t think I could stand being in Vermont. I’m still a city girl. I also came to New York to visit Val, who is a now junior at Barnard.

Val is dating someone new—she’s always dating someone new, or so it seems to me—and I have a boyfriend back in San Francisco I met at music camp. After that summer in New York, our parents sent us straight back to that camp—no more adventures for a while. But something had happened to me that summer and forever afterward I knew I didn’t want to be a singer; after coming back from New York, I wanted to be a writer. What had happened to Valentine eventually happened to me. I filled out, rejected the pixie cut Clover had insisted I get that summer, and grew my hair long again. Even if it is not quite as “sophisticated” long, Teddy—my boyfriend—likes running his fingers through it, and I’m at the age where things like that are much more important to me.

Anyway, after that summer in New York I didn’t want to be a singer anymore, I wanted to be a writer. I kept on “taking notes.” Sometimes when I think back to that summer, it seems like all the big things that happened happened not to me but to Valentine, and I suppose in a way they did. But then I remember something that Clover once told us, that afternoon at the Frick, that “a true Romantic knows that the inner life is the thing, the only thing that really matters, in the end.” If that’s true—that the inner life is the only thing that matters—then everything I remember about that summer will always play a big part in mine. I remember Clover telling us that happiness is the most fragile thing in the world.

And as for my sister, Valentine—but how am I to know about Valentine? What started to happen that summer is finally complete. We’re not close anymore. You can still spend time with someone—you can still have a lot of fun with them, even—without being close. Being close is different.

In her will, Aunt Theo left us a modest amount of money, which we can use once we’re twenty-one. It isn’t a lot of money. Clover said she wanted us to think of it as traveling money, for us to go off and have some adventures with. She said Aunt Theo believed in the necessity of women leading “large lives.” Aunt Theo also left me her book collection. She left Valentine that nude portrait of her that was painted one morning in Paris when she was a young woman and the red satin Lanvin ballet pumps she used to do the tango in, after learning from Clover that they wore the same shoe size. And Valentine actually
wears
them sometimes, not caring if they get ruined. If they were mine, I wouldn’t wear them ever. But that’s the difference between Valentine and me.

Valentine hasn’t gone on the stage. She’s an art history major; she’s doing her thesis on Boucher’s
Seasons,
which we first saw at the Frick with Clover that summer. Clover? We don’t see or hear much from Clover anymore. After Aunt Theo died she left Clover most of her money, including her apartment in the Village. But last I heard she had sold the apartment and was living abroad, out of her orange Hermes suitcase. She used to send us postcards sometimes, then they petered out. Oh, but I’m lying. We used to write back but then one day we stopped. We got swept up in our own lives.

We got swept back up also into the modern world. It was as if, once we left Aunt Theo’s apartment, we shed some kind of magical golden skin that had protected us. When we left there, the edges of things just never felt quite so soft ever again.

And another thing: I never write real letters to anyone anymore, though I miss them. There was also a time after we went back to San Francisco when Alexander and I wrote postcards, and I kept the ones he sent me and showed them to all my friends. They were very impressed because hardly anybody sends real mail anymore. But then we stopped and all that seems a long time ago now.

And Val? Well, absolutely everybody calls Val Valentine at this point. She always wears her hair pinned up and it isn’t so bright red anymore anyway—it’s more like what you’d call auburn. And another thing is when I look at her now I no longer think that her eyes are violet. I see what Mom means about them being just plain dark blue. Which makes me wonder, actually, about a lot of things, a lot of other things I might have gotten wrong, might have made more otherworldly and fabulous than they actually ever were. Or does it? Was I so very wrong? Because it also makes me think of that incredibly hot, bright green afternoon when Clover and I strolled through Central Park and went to see
Calder’s Circus
at the Whitney—and how
Calder’s Circus
freezes some of that preciousness in miniature: how when you look at it you could be a child again, you could believe that your beautiful older sister’s eyes were really and truly the color violet. Violet is
still
one of my favorite words.