The Summer Invitation (19 page)

These days, if you saw Valentine on the street, you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that she was born in Paris; she has something of the Continental air. I don’t know how she did it, but she has turned into the sort of woman who knows how to tie a scarf and understands the allure of silence.

Woman, not girl. She’s the kind of twenty-year-old you’d take for twenty-five.

One day after hanging out in Valentine’s dorm room, we decided to take the subway downtown. We got off in the Village, not far from the building on Lower Fifth where Aunt Theo’s old apartment used to be. It was so strange to think of that apartment existing without her. What had happened to the secret roof-deck, the terra-cotta pots, and the lemon trees? We stopped at Caffe Reggio—we take our coffee black now but can’t resist the opportunity to have it piled high with whipped cream if it’s available—and then decided to go and walk around the Village. It was one of those fall days in Manhattan when everyone is so grateful that the heat has lifted that it’s as if the whole city experiences this brief, collective happiness.

“That summer,” said Valentine. “Can you believe that we actually weren’t allowed to wear jeans that summer? It just seems so incredible to think of now!”

“Trousers,” I said, remembering. “Clover specifically said that Aunt Theo didn’t care for women in trousers.”

“Trousers!” squealed Valentine. “Trousers!” It had been years since we had heard that word. We laughed and laughed just at the thought of it.

“That summer…” said Valentine again, and there was something a little serious about her voice when she said this, and I wondered what was coming. Revelations, I thought.

“What about that summer?” I asked, in a different tone of voice myself.

“Well, it wasn’t only first love I learned about that summer.” She blushed, and now that she’s all grown up it’s not like Valentine to blush. Then she asked me: “Oh, Franny. You never even guessed?”

“Guessed what?”

She threw her hands up in the air. She said once again: “Oh, Franny.
My father.
”

It was years since we had mentioned him. I could barely remember the way, when we were still little girls, we used to make up all those bedtime stories about him.

“What about your father?” I said now.

“Why, he came to that party, on the night Aunt Theo died. He came all the way from Paris because Clover invited him. Clover knew, see. That he was my father. Wasn’t that thoughtful of her? She wanted us to finally meet.”

I felt almost betrayed—only almost—that Clover had never told me, when all this time I’d thought I was so much closer to Clover that summer than Valentine was. Also, I was disappointed I hadn’t guessed any of this, when I thought of myself as being so much more observant than Val. Now it seemed that I hadn’t been quite so observant on the night of that party after all.

“Laurent Victoire,” she said. “The man who was there from Paris.”

“Oh,” I said, remembering, “he was the one who painted
L’heure de la lavande.
that was over her bed.”

“Yes,” said Valentine. “Before he fell in love with Mom, years, years before, he was in love with Theo.”

“Everybody was,” I said.

“Yes, I guess so. But Mom met him through Aunt Theo, in fact. The two of them had stayed friends. But it was Theo, Clover said, who took care of Mom and me when I was born. Theo bought me all these fancy French baby clothes, remember.”

I remembered. I remembered them because after Mom moved to San Francisco and married Dad and I was born, she dressed me in Valentine’s French baby clothes. She still has some of those clothes, even now.

“You know,” Valentine went on. “Mom told me she still dreams of that apartment sometimes.”

“What apartment?”

“The apartment in Paris. Laurent’s. It must have been the same one where he painted Aunt Theo, I think. She says it was very beautiful, the most beautiful apartment she was ever inside of in all her life. She says it was rose-colored.
Rose
,” repeated Valentine with a sigh, to give emphasis to the image.

And I saw in my imagination a rose-colored Parisian apartment. It was as if I had been there before, in another life, and that made sense because my mother had.

I didn’t feel hurt or angry that Val had known more than I did. No, the main thing I felt was:
curious.

“Who knows? Maybe he’ll invite me to stay in that apartment in Paris someday…” Valentine was saying now.

Life is so rich, I thought to myself. It was so rich that you missed out on things even when you thought you were so good at paying attention. For some reason after I had this thought, I wanted to go back to Val’s dorm room and start writing down a new story. There were so many stories I wanted to tell and I was excited about all of them.

I’m happy, I thought, and told myself to try to remember this moment before it was gone. This is what Clover meant.

Then all of a sudden, there we were standing in the park just in front of the Washington Square Arch, near the same spot where we used to go and have picnics sometimes, when a man stopped us and asked Valentine: “Excuse me. Are you a ballerina?”

I didn’t blame him for thinking it. Val was wearing a black cashmere pullover and pony-skin slippers, and then there’s something about the way she stands these days. She’s grown into her legs and she’s not as jumpy, not as expressive, as before.

Val paused. What she said surprised me: “I was.”

The man said: “Oh. Thought so. Are you dancing in anything now?”

Then Val laughed lightly and said: “No. I meant I was a ballerina years, years ago.”

“When?” the man said. He leaned toward her; I think it was her air of slight sadness that captured him.

“One summer,” said Val. “One beautiful summer.”

And heads held high we both walked on, through the Arch into that rich and marvelous New York City light.

Acknowledgments

Much gratitude goes to my agent, Emily Forland, and to my editor, Nancy Mercado, as well as to Angie Chen and the wonderful team at Roaring Brook. And special thanks to the late, great Lindy Hess, who first suggested that I write a young adult book, and to Jane O’Reilly, who made my summer chaperoning gig happen.