The Summer Invitation (2 page)

“Well,” she said afterward, “that’s Theo all over. I suppose you’re dying to go?”

“Now, now—” Dad began, in the voice that means:
not so fast.

“Oh, Edward, but Theo’s arranged it so perfectly,” said Mom. “They’re going to have a
chaperone.
And we’ve met Clover before. In Paris once, don’t you remember?”

“I remember,” said Dad.

“Clover Leslie is a lovely young woman and I’m sure she’ll be a most responsible chaperone,” said Mom. “I feel all right sending the girls away if they’ll be staying with somebody we know. You thought she was lovely, Edward, remember. Remember,” she kept on saying, really begging him to let us go.

Meanwhile, Valentine was getting carried away, as if our parents had already said we could go, no questions asked.

“New York City!” exclaimed Valentine. “New York City! An apartment in the Village! Oh, just wait till I tell my friends. They’re going to be sooo jealous.”

“Valentine,”
began Mom, to admonish her for being bratty. But Valentine didn’t listen. Instead she leaned over and whispered into my ear, “There will be cute boys there,” and I started to feel a little bit left out because I could already imagine a whole summer ahead of us in which she would be more excited about meeting cute boys in New York City than hanging out with me.

“Well, Edward?” said Mom. “What do you think?” It was clear that she already had decided to let us go, but then Mom can be kind of a pushover. Still, I could tell that she really did want us to get to go, because she said: “Remember, Theodora Bell was such a great influence on me when I was a young woman, and I’d love for her to be an influence on the girls’ life too. Also”—she reached for the letter across the table and skimmed it again—“it says that she’ll be joining Clover in New York the middle of August. So, she’ll be there too! The girls will get to meet her.”

By the end of breakfast, we’d all convinced Dad to say yes. I think it was the idea of us having a chaperone for part of the time that sold him. He remarked that Aunt Theo’s unusual proposal sounded like a very “educational” experiment. And Mom said: “Girls, it will be a summer to remember all your life.”

2

The Bluebird of Greenwich Village

The previous three summers, Val and I had gone to a music camp. We were sorry to miss it because we liked all the friends we’d made there, but no way would we give up the opportunity to go to New York.

“A program,” exclaimed Val. “A program! Who wants that? That’s like being
in school.
We’re going to have adventures. In
New York City.
We’re going to Live!”

I hoped so. Oh, how I hoped so! When you’re fourteen or even seventeen, it seems like you’re just waiting for Life with a Capital L to happen.

Meanwhile, every night at dinner, Mom and Dad drank wine and discussed Aunt Theo. She was our main subject of conversation in the days leading up to our trip.

Dad told us: “She used to be one of the great beauties of the age.”

“From a long line of beauties,” said Mom, and reminded us that Theo’s ancestors had been painted by John Singer Sargent, whose painting
Portrait of Madame X
of a redhead in a black velvet gown we once studied at school.

“And when she was at Radcliffe,” Dad chimed in, “she was on the cover of
Mademoiselle.
The college girl issue. Do they still do that issue anymore?”

“Edward!” exclaimed Mom, giggling. “I don’t even think that
Mademoiselle
exists anymore, does it? Let alone the college girl issue. Oh dear! We must be getting old.”

Now they both laughed, which is something I’ve noticed that grownups do when speaking of getting old, as if it were funny. But is it?

“And then after Radcliffe, of course, she was an Avedon model,” said Dad, trying to draw Val and me back into the grownup conversation.

“A
what
model?” asked Val.

“Avedon. Richard Avedon. He was
the
fashion photographer of the age.”

“Very chic,” said Mom. “Why—girls! Remember that movie
Funny Face
?” We both love Audrey Hepburn, so of course we did. That’s the one where she’s a bookstore clerk in Greenwich Village who gets discovered to be a model and goes to Paris. “Well. The Fred Astaire character was based on him.”

“Oh,” we said, swooning. We just loved musicals.

“Aunt Theo used to have a lot of boyfriends, right?” said Val. Being seventeen, this was her idea of the most important thing.

Mom paused and said thoughtfully: “Yes, though she wouldn’t have called them boyfriends, which, come to think of it, is not a very attractive or romantic word. She would have called them lovers.”

Lovers: I said the word to myself, just in my head. I would have been embarrassed to say it out loud.
Lovers.
Lovers plural! Just imagine it! I was at the age where a lot of my friends had had their first kisses by now, and some of them were even starting to have boyfriends, but I have to confess: I’d never even been kissed. Maybe this summer, I thought. Maybe in New York …

“The worst kind of heartbreaker,” said Dad. “Remember that story about what happened to that one boyfriend, Red Lyman, the Harvard quarterback who attempted suicide…”

“Edward,”
said Mom, in the voice that meant:
not in front of the girls.

The night before we left for New York, our last night at home with Mom and Dad for a long time, we all watched this movie that Aunt Theo was in when she was young and living in Hollywood for a time. The movie was from the late 1960s, Dad said. Aunt Theo played a sexy co-ed wearing a long black graduation gown and got to kiss a very famous movie star. It’s true that she was as beautiful as everybody said. Not pretty—beautiful. But to me, you know what Aunt Theo looked like?
Like a cross between an angel and a witch.

Early the next morning, we got to fly to New York by ourselves. It was the first plane flight I’d ever been on without Mom and Dad, and I felt so light and free! Then we took a cab to Aunt Theo’s, which felt like a very dashing and independent thing to do. In San Francisco, we hardly ever have any reason to take cabs. But in New York City, they’re such a wonderful yellow, just like in the movies, like the yolk of a very rich egg.

Aunt Theo’s apartment was on the seventeenth floor of this huge building on what Mom and Dad said was referred to as “Lower Fifth.” Dad said, “Leave it to Theodora Bell to have the most exclusive address in New York City,” but you wouldn’t know this just to look at it because a lot of the buildings we saw were much more la-di-da than Theo’s. I mean all the really shiny renovated ones jutting into the sky, where you know they have newly glazed bathtubs and new flat-screen televisions and new everything.

Theo’s building wasn’t like that. Theo’s building was like a big crumbling piece of wedding cake; it was this pale yellow stone, almost the color of butterscotch, and the windows had white molding, which maked me think of frosting. Inside, the floors in the lobby were brown-and-white diamond parquet, and then there was this wallpaper that was thick chocolate-and-navy stripes.

The head doorman was named Oscar, and right away we decided he must be Viennese. He wore bow ties, which are something you never see anyone wear in California. Miss Bell’s apartment, he called it, as in “Ah yes, Miss Frances and Miss Valentine! You are the young ladies who will be staying in Miss Bell’s apartment.”

“Why, after you, Miss Frances,” said Valentine as we got in the elevator. I felt at once that she was making fun of me. Evidently Oscar had gotten the memo from Aunt Theo to call me Frances, not Franny.

“After you, Miss Valentine,” I said.

“But Miss Valentine sounds
way
cooler than Miss Frances and you know it.”

Aunt Theo’s apartment was one of those really cool ones where the elevator opens right onto the apartment itself. We’d never seen anything like that before! You don’t ever have to see your neighbors in the hallway, just riding in the elevator, I guess.

That was the first surprise. The second one was meeting Clover Leslie, our chaperone. She was there waiting for us in front of the elevator right away. We hugged her and she hugged us back, as if she had known us forever. She looked at our suitcases and then said, as casually as if the three of us were already friends and happened to be in the middle of some ongoing conversation: “But don’t you have any dresses? Trust me, dresses are the way to go in New York in the summer. You’re not going to believe how hot it gets here. You’re going to
perish
of exhaustion.”

Perish.
That was the type of word Clover used. I could tell from the way she spoke that she
had
learned a lot from Aunt Theo. In some ways they were really quite different, but they had this striking way of expressing themselves. Even though I’d never met Aunt Theo in person, I could tell exactly how she spoke from the tone of her letters.

“What do you think Clover will be like?” I had asked Valentine, back when we were still in San Francisco.

“I don’t know, I’m just glad she’s not old.”

“Twenty-eight’s pretty old.”

“Not old
old
, silly.”

It was, to me. Old enough that I could not quite imagine being it myself someday. When I thought about it, I only ever got to twenty-one or twenty-two. I could imagine going away to college, but not graduating from college. I couldn’t figure out what one would have to look forward to after that.

Back in San Francisco, Dad had made the mistake of asking Aunt Theo if she could send us a picture of Clover. Theo dashed off a brisk little postcard admonishing him:

No pictures. This summer let mystery prevail. Basta!

XXX

Theo

Valentine said, “I hope she’s very beautiful.”

I was doubtful that there was so much beauty in the world, what with us already knowing Theo the former Avedon model and all.

“Maybe.”

“Well, you have to be good-looking to live in New York City. And thin! That too.”

Clover, as it turned out when we finally met her, was small. She had the same shape figure Valentine’s getting, with the boobs and the tiny waist and all, but she was short: I could tell she’d have to watch it a bit, say if she ate too many pastries. Valentine’s five foot nine now and I’m five foot seven, and it’s funny because we both towered over her even though she was supposed to be our chaperone. Also, she didn’t look anywhere near twenty-eight. And because Valentine’s so tall and can look quite glamorous all of a sudden, say if she’s wearing makeup, there were times you might have thought that Valentine and not Clover was the grownup.

Still, there was just something so cute about Clover. She made me think of a plump little bluebird. Her voice was very high for a grown woman’s, and she talked and moved very fast and kind of fluttered around the apartment. She wore these delicate glasses with rhinestones dusting the tips. And blue was her favorite color—she had fluffy blond hair and big blue eyes and it suited her. The day we met her she was wearing a pale blue dress with breezy bell-shaped sleeves.

We explained to her that in San Francisco, the weather is pretty much the same all year long. We live in blue jeans and T-shirts and Converse sneakers. But even after we told her all that she asked: “But don’t you have summer wardrobes?”

I thought the word
wardrobe
sounded very grand, like say you were packing a steamer trunk for a transatlantic crossing.

She continued, “You know, Theo doesn’t like trousers.”

“Trousers?”
said Valentine.

Was this an East Coast word or something? We had never heard anybody use it.

“Pants,” Clover said, almost spitting the word. “Women in pants.”

“Oh.”

We pondered the marvelous complexity of a world in which there were such elaborate rules. We had never before dreamed of such things!

Val pointed out, “But that’s so old-fashioned of her!”

“Exactly,” Clover said calmly, as if the phrase
old-fashioned
was a compliment, which I don’t think is what Valentine meant it to be. “She doesn’t like trousers on women, or short skirts either. So, when she comes to New York in August, you’ll have to be dressed appropriately.”

“What’s appropriately?” I asked.

“Oh. Well, Aunt Theo says that one should dress to have a swing in one’s step and to be ready for Italy. You know, as if you were dressing for an Italian lover.”

There was that word again! Lover. It was thrilling, if also a little embarrassing.
Perish. Lover.
Just imagine having the opportunity to use the two of them in the same sentence!

Valentine got straight to the point and asked Clover: “Have you ever had one?”

“What?”

“An Italian lover.”

Clover laughed and said, “There’s time to ask me all that later. Come on, you two, you’d better unpack. Here, let me show you to your bedroom.”

On the way there, we took the time now to look around the apartment. The first thing I noticed was that it was done up in all of these crazy, rich colors. There were autumn leaf yellow walls in the kitchen and sapphire blue walls in the living room. Books everywhere.
Old
books. Penguin paperbacks with orange and green spines, big art books, fashion books, you name it. Paintings, mostly of voluptuous shell-colored nudes.

“You know what all these colors kind of remind me of,” I said. “Matisse.”

Valentine, as if sensing this, said, “Oh, Franny, stop showing off! We’re not in school anymore.”

“Look!” I pointed at a book on the coffee table, ignoring Val’s comment. The cover said:
Made in Paris
By Theodora Bell.

When I picked it up and looked at the jacket, I realized that it was a portrait of the great Theo herself, photographed in profile and wearing a strapless, feathered black ball gown and pair of long lilac gloves. I turned to Clover and asked her:

“Did Aunt Theo really write this? That’s so cool. I had no idea.”