The Summer Invitation Read online

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  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 Clov
er and asked her:

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

  “Yes,” said Clover. “When she was very young. Younger than me, even, I think.”

  We would be sleeping in the bedroom downstairs. It had dusty coral walls and two twin beds with brass headboards. The sheets and pillows were mismatched, but in a way, I thought, that looked better than matched—like Aunt Theo couldn’t be bothered to try that hard. Clover left us to unpack alone, which I thought was nice of her, since of course we had all kinds of things we wanted to talk about right now.

  “I get the bed by the window!” exclaimed Val, sitting down on it and sighing. Then she tapped the mattress and said, “Not too comfy a bed actually. And to think I thought Aunt Theo was loaded. Actually to tell you the truth this place isn’t as fancy as I thought it would be. What do you think, Franny?”

  “I love it,” I said immediately and rather protectively. But I saw that Val had a point. There was no television, and the kitchen with the dusty black-and-white diamond floors hadn’t been remodeled in forever. I started to get the impression that Aunt Theo wasn’t big on modern conveniences of any kind.

  “Oh my God, I am just dying to read Aunt Theo’s novel. Aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, later maybe,” said Valentine, though she’s not as big on reading novels as I am, to tell you the truth. “I’m dying of thirst after that flight and I want something sweet ASAP. Lemonade or, I know, let’s go get raspberry lime rickeys!” That was our favorite drink back in San Francisco.

  “But where will we be able to find them?” I asked her.

  “Oh, Franny!” Valentine flashed me her Big Sister look. “It’s New York City. You can find anything here.”

  “Okay, but let’s unpack first.”

  Just as I said this, we heard a knock on the door. It was Clover, saying the magic words: “Girls, would you like to go shopping?”

  3

  Uncommon Cottons

  Clover walked like a real New Yorker, elbows out and eyes straight ahead. When she went outside, she took off her glasses with the rhinestones and put on a pair of huge vanilla-colored sunglasses.

  “I got them with Theo in Paris,” she said by way of explanation. Then, to Valentine, “You were born there, weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Valentine, with a little bit of pride in her voice that I knew her well enough to recognize.

  Clover changed the subject by asking us: “Don’t you two have sunglasses?”

  We shook our heads.

  “Oh, I forgot, San Francisco! Those wonderful dreamy fogs rolling in. I love it, it feels so good on my skin. But in New York in the summer, you’ll want to get sunglasses. That will be fun, picking sunglasses out.”

  I was glad that somebody had finally said something good about San Francisco. I felt at such a disadvantage, having been born in California and not Paris, like Val. Or even just the East Coast, where Clover was from and which was obviously superior to the West, or why would Aunt Theo have taken such a strong stand against ever coming to visit us?

  But I’d always had this feeling about the East. We had been in New York City one time before when Valentine was eleven and I was eight and the San Francisco Girls Chorus got to perform at Alice Tully Hall, which is part of Lincoln Center. Dad’s big on music and still talks about it: My daughters performed at Alice Tully Hall.

  So we performed at Alice Tully Hall and went to tea at the Plaza and had our pictures taken in front of the portrait of Eloise and went on a pony ride in Central Park. We went to the MoMA and the Met and the Museum of Natural History. We both made up our minds that one day we’d come here again.

  You know what I noticed right away when we got here? New York has the most beautiful light. San Francisco is beautiful just generally but New York has this light—it just has this richness. It has different dimensions. By now it was going on 6:00 p.m., the heat lifting a bit, and we walked down one of the side streets with all the marvelous old brownstones in all the different shades of brick: red, pink, beige. We don’t have much brick like that in San Francisco.

  “Oh, this way,” said Clover, and we followed her down another one of the side streets till we got to this cool vintage store.

  “Oh,” Valentine and I swooned, gazing at a full-skirted, fluffy orange dress in the window.

  “You could pull off that color,” said Clover to Valentine but not, I couldn’t help but notice, to me.

  We went inside and exclaimed over stiff crinolines, bunny-soft cashmeres, tiny beaded purses.

  The lady behind the counter started talking to Clover. She was positively ancient but cool-looking. Her eyelids were all sultry with black liner and she was wearing this black linen sort of sheath dress with coils of turquoise on both her wrists. They looked like underwater creatures, those bracelets, like they might spring to life and bite you.

  I eavesdropped on their conversation, catching certain parts.

  “But whatever became of the historian?”

  “It didn’t work out.”

  “Who broke it off?”

  “He did.”

  “Clover,” the woman said, “are you trying to tell me you don’t have a lover at the moment?”

  Clover laughed lightly and said, “Afraid so.”

  “But, my dear, that’s all wrong. I’m seventy-five and I have two.”

  Lover. That word was in the air, here in the Village, this summer.

  Valentine was leafing through an old Mademoiselle magazine from July 1948 and lazily reading aloud from the captions on the photo shoots: “The Ultra Violets,” “British Imports,” “Uncommon Cottons…”

  Clover said to us, “Girls, this is Joan. Joan, this is Franny and Valentine. They’re visiting from San Francisco.”

  “San Francisco!” said Joan. “I used to work at City Lights. I mean, way back when it started.”

  Dad was always trying to educate us about local history, and so we did know a little bit about City Lights Bookstore and the Beats. We made conversation about that, and then Joan picked out some clothing for us.

  Here is what she chose.

  For Valentine: a Mexican circle skirt from the 1950s, heavy green cotton scattered with faint gold gems that jangled a bit whenever she moved.

  “See, you can just throw that on with a camisole, and it will look a little more modern,” said Clover. “And please don’t ever say tank top. Say camisole: camisole is a lovely word. I despair of the words tank top.”

  Valentine did a twirl so we could hear the gems stir again.

  “She’s a beauty,” said Joan to Clover approvingly, and I tried my best not to be jealous. But then Valentine tugged at the waistband of the skirt as though she was just itching to get out of it and said, “No thanks. It’s just not for me. It’s so heavy … and long.”

  She had a point: girls our age almost never wore long skirts anymore. The shorter the better was all the rage, and Val was always disappointed that Mom never let us go out of the house in really short ones.

  “Well, of course the cotton is heavy,” said Joan, bristling. “It’s beautiful quality. Young people these days are just used to everything being thin and cheap, you wear it one season and throw it away. Why, that skirt is over fifty years old!”

  “Exactly,” said Valentine, before slipping back into the dressing room to take it off. I knew that if Mom had been with us, she would have said Valentine in that tone of voice to let her know she was being rude. Clover had just met us, so she couldn’t get away with scolding her.

  I turned out to be a better customer than Valentine. Here is what Joan chose for me: a navy-blue 1960s shift dress with a white Peter Pan collar. I thought at first it looked too babyish, but then Clover said, “Not at all! On the contrary, it’s very sophisticated. And très française. Did you ever see The Umbrellas of Cherbourg?”

  Did we ever see The Umbrellas of Cherbourg?

  “Oh God,” said Valentine, “have we ever! Mom used to make us sing from it all the
time!”

  “They’re singers,” Clover explained to Joan. “Classically trained.”

  “I’ll call it my Catherine Deneuve dress,” I said, picturing myself wearing a big white bow in my hair like she does in the movie, but more than that, much more than that, picturing myself wearing my new dress and being in love. Then my imagination ran off with me. It rains a lot in San Francisco too, you know, just like in the movie. Say I got a trench coat. Say I had a boyfriend. We could wander the hilly streets arm in arm, the rain coming down. We could sing:

  If it takes forever I will wait for you

  For a thousand summers I will wait for you …

  And so on and so on, till we got to the end of the song.

  Valentine and I decided to get both outfits, even though at first Val had said her skirt was too old-fashioned. Mom and Dad had given us a certain amount of money to spend on shopping in New York, and we thought that these seemed original and worthwhile. Then after Joan had rung up our purchases Clover stopped to look at a soft, woven honey-colored purse with tortoiseshell handles. The woven fabric was something that Clover called “raffia.” Joan said it was from the fifties. I didn’t quite “get” it, but Clover assured us it was very chic and “ready for Italy” and bought it immediately.

  Once we got up to the register, I noticed that Val was trying on scarves. She was tying them softly around her hair, around the beautiful copper curls I wished were mine. When she finished with one scarf, she put it back and picked up another—the last one she picked up was this brilliant shade of green. Back at home, I couldn’t recall Val ever wearing that color, but now that I saw her in it, I knew that shade belonged to her alone and that I’d never ever try to wear it myself. Clover and Joan saw it too, and then they did something I thought was strange—they sighed. The way Mom sighs when she remembers Paris. As if they too were remembering something.

  “That has to be yours, Valentine,” said Clover.

  And then I heard Val asking, rudely and rather randomly I thought: “Where does Theo get all her money?”