The Summer Invitation Read online

  Clover shrugged and said, “Oh, that. Her family made it way, way back. Mills or something.”

  After we left the store and were walking down the street again, I looked down at my feet and came back to reality. I was wearing a pair of dingy black flip-flops. Valentine was wearing purple ones. Clover had on a pair of white patent-leather sandals, and her toes were painted this luscious peach color.

  I made up my mind then and there. We’d have to get new shoes to go with our new clothes. And we’d have to get our toenails painted.

  “What’s that color?” I asked Clover. “I mean, the one on your toes?”

  “Oh, that,” said Clover, looking down at her toes with a sly little smile. “Italian Love Affair.”

  4

  The Secret Roof-Deck

  It was Clover who got the idea to give Aunt Theo a party on August 14, the night she was supposed to arrive back in New York.

  “A birthday party?” asked Valentine. “Old people don’t always like to be reminded of their birthdays, you know.”

  “Never you mind about old people,” said Clover. “And anyway, her birthday’s in October, not August.”

  “So it’s more like a welcome back party then,” I said, trying to sound more knowledgeable about these things than Valentine.

  “Yes, I suppose so,” said Clover. “Although you know what kind of party Aunt Theo used to have when I was your age?”

  “What?”

  “She called them Getting to Know You parties.”

  “A what party?”

  “A Getting to Know You party,” Clover repeated. “You see, Aunt Theo used to have these parties where the whole idea was to bring a fascinating stranger. So, I would have to go scampering all over the streets of the Village introducing myself to possible strangers to invite. ‘Unknowns,’ Aunt Theo called them. At the beginning of the party, we always had this special ritual we did. Aunt Theo would make us all hold hands and sing ‘Getting to Know You.’ And then after that, the party could begin.”

  “I wouldn’t be caught dead,” announced Valentine.

  “You wouldn’t be caught dead what?” asked Clover, smiling.

  “Holding hands with strangers. Singing songs with strangers.”

  “Well, I would!” I said, just to be contrary. “I think it sounds—interesting.”

  “Franny! Mom and Dad raised us not to speak to strangers.”

  “Well, if you’re so big on doing only what Mom and Dad say—”

  “Girls! Stop all this quarreling. Never you mind. Anyway, I don’t imagine that your parents would much like it if I had you two dragging strangers off the streets, so let’s just call this a Welcome Back party, shall we? Whatever we call it, the important thing is to make it a party to remember.”

  I liked that idea—“a party to remember.” I was looking forward to planning it, and most of all, to finally meeting Aunt Theo in person. But then, right from the beginning, I think I was more interested in the characters of Aunt Theodora and her protégée Clover Leslie than Valentine was. That’s how I thought of Theo and Clover—as characters out of an old-fashioned novel who had suddenly appeared in our lives, making everything somehow more colorful and fascinating than before. Anyway, here are some things I learned about Clover Leslie:

  1. She was an orphan. When she was growing up in Boston, Aunt Theo was her guardian.

  “For how long?” Valentine asked.

  “Forever,” said Clover, and we didn’t ask her any more questions about that, though of course we wanted to know how her parents had died or if they’d gone missing or what. Our curiosity was only natural, the same way it’s only natural that Valentine wants to know who her real father is.

  2. Clover was a sculptress. She had gone to Bennington, which is a tiny school on a hill in Vermont that is famous for artists and writers and modern dancers. After school, she got a studio in the Village and had had some shows and sold her pieces to very high-end stores on the Upper East Side. Her work, she said, was more uptown than downtown because her sensibility (that was a new word; I filed it away) was old-fashioned. She was a classicist, she said: another new word. There were a couple of her sculptures at Aunt Theo’s apartment and she showed them to us. They were tiny and of mysterious sea creatures; the white porcelain was touched with pale blue, her favorite color.

  “Do you have a thing about the ocean?” asked Valentine.

  “Absolutely,” said Clover.

  “Do you ever do anything else? Like, do you ever do nudes?”

  “Val!” I exclaimed, embarrassed.

  But Clover only said casually, “Sure. All the time.”

  “Male nudes?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “Do you have male models? Like, at your studio?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “You do? Oh my God. Are they cute?”

  “Val!”

  “Of course. Why would I sculpt them if they weren’t?” said Clover, and laughed. Clover laughed a lot but we never felt that she was laughing at us, the way you do with some grownups.

  When Clover wasn’t wearing blue, she wore pale pink. Every so often, gray. Blond colors. But mostly she wore blue. Blue cotton dresses, blue gingham artist smocks, sheer blue nighties, lacy blue bras and underpants: I know, because she always hand-washed them.

  She hand-washed almost all of her clothing, actually. We thought that was funny at first. She’d swish around the apartment wringing her clothing out in a bucket full of lavender-scented soapsuds. Actually it was a white-painted champagne bucket that she told me Aunt Theo had gotten from some hotel in Paris. The paint was chipping now, but it still looked pretty dashing to me. In fact, like a lot of Aunt Theo’s things, it almost looked better because it was chipped—because it gave off an air of history. Back home, Valentine and I just tossed everything into the washing machine. This ritual of hand-washing was something new and grownup. It made Clover seem like such a lady.

  Rules, Aunt Theo had written to us in a second letter on the same lavender-colored paper as the one before.

  Clover, your chaperone, will have a private bedroom and bath. You are not welcome to them, but everything else in the apartment is yours for the summer. Clover is an artist and needs time to herself during the day but most especially in the morning. In the evening she will be game for anything.

  The apartment had two floors and Clover slept on the top one. Valentine and I went to sleep every night next to each other on the hard little twin beds with brass headboards. We understood that this was only appropriate at our age, sharing a bedroom together. We were still girls. Clover was a woman.

  Other times, when Aunt Theo was in New York, the top floor was her bedroom. Clover only lived there when Aunt Theo was away on her travels. One time, we asked Clover where she lived the rest of the year.

  “Out of an orange suitcase,” she said, with that light little laugh of hers.

  “Why orange?” said Valentine. I knew she was wondering that because Clover always wore blue.

  “It’s Hermès,” said Clover, and explained to us that orange was the color of the Hermès brand.

  I’ve noticed this thing about Valentine: she won’t let things be. I get it when grownups go silent. And I don’t mind filling in the blanks in my head.

  But not Valentine. She kept right at it. She said: “Why don’t you live here? You could sleep in our room, couldn’t you?”

  “Girls! You don’t understand. Aunt Theo believes in alone time.”

  The way she believed in skirts but didn’t believe in trousers, the way she believed in letters but not e-mail … I was trying to keep track of it all so one day I too could understand.

  “And then,” Clover went on, “if I were here, how would she entertain her gentleman friends?”

  The phrase entertain her gentleman friends was quite beyond us, especially when we both knew Aunt Theo was well into her sixties by now, and even Valentine stopped pushing it. One couldn’t be interested in that side of life then; one sim
ply couldn’t.

  The next afternoon when Clover was out doing some errands, Valentine yawned and said, “You know what I’d like to do right now?”

  “What?”

  “Go upstairs.”

  I was about to say, “Oh, Val!” But what I ended up saying instead was: “Me too.”

  We were giggling as we made our way upstairs. The banister was painted this bottle-green color but the paint was chipping. Well, that wasn’t unusual: most everything at Aunt Theo’s was chipping.

  “Do you think that means she’s very poor or very rich?” Valentine asked.

  “Neither,” I said. “It’s just her aesthetic.”

  “Her aesthetic? Oh, Jesus. Who are you trying to sound like? Clover?”

  “No.”

  But Valentine had caught me. I was trying to sound like Clover, though I hadn’t noticed it before she pointed it out.

  We went up the green staircase till we got to a landing with the same brown-and-white diamond parquet floor as the lobby of the apartment building. There was a salmon-colored velvet cotton curtain you had to tug at to cross into the bedroom. I liked this odd little space. It made you pause. It made you wonder what the bedroom would be like, rather than you jumping into the bedroom right away. But Valentine pulled at the curtain impatiently and then, all at once, we were standing there.

  Aunt Theo’s bedroom was painted red but a red that had a lot of dimension to it, a lot of roses and oranges enfolded in it. A mysterious red, something I had never seen before, because I’d always thought of red being kind of obvious. On the floor was an Oriental rug that was all olive greens and golds. And on the bed itself was a leopard-skin blanket, soft and touchable and yet kind of dangerous-looking at the same time.

  “Cool,” said Valentine, and I knew it was the leopard-skin she was referring to.

  As in the rest of the apartment, there were lots of old books and paintings, and the paintings were mostly of nudes.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s keep looking. Clover might be back any minute.”

  We got closer to the bed, where Clover’s pet turtle, Carlo, was snuggled up in a fold of the leopard skin. We were surprised at first to see the turtle out of a cage, but looked down only to notice his tiny cage at the foot of the bed.

  “Ah,” said Valentine, leaning over to stroke him. Then she said, “Hey, I think that one’s of Aunt Theo, isn’t it?” and pointed to the painting above the bed.

  It was yet another nude and showed the tall, willowy lines of a beautiful brunette captured in a pale blue light. What was interesting about the portrait to me was that Aunt Theo was looking straight ahead without apology. Her body was less developed than many of the other nudes, but next to her, they looked like schoolgirls and she looked like a grown woman.

  I wondered if I’d ever look like that.

  “That picture was painted in Paris,” Valentine said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just can tell. Paris in the morning. Something about that shade of blue, that light.”

  A title was written in cursive in the bottom corner of the painting. The title was: L’heure de la lavande, “The Lavender Hour.” I read it out loud.

  “Can you imagine letting someone see you naked?” asked Valentine.

  “Oh my God, no. Can you?”

  What she said surprised me: “Sometimes.” And I saw that this must be one of the differences between being fourteen and being seventeen. Because I couldn’t imagine letting someone see me naked: I blushed, I almost wanted to throw up, just to think of it.

  Then Val opened the door to Clover’s private bath, which is where we saw her lacy blue bra and undies dripping over the side of the claw-foot tub.

  “I’m so going to wear sexy lingerie as soon as I have a guy who’s going to see it,” said Valentine. “But I wouldn’t wear blue, I don’t think. I’m going to wear black! Black lace and what are those things called, garters. God, I can’t wait. Franny, do you think Clover has someone?”

  “She told that woman in the shop that she didn’t.”

  Valentine said, “Well, not now, but she has. She has in the past, and I’m going to get her to tell us all about it. I need information.”

  “About what, Val?”

  “Sex, dummy.”

  “Oh.”

  “I mean,” Val went on, “it’s New York City, there have to be so many men around! And Mom and Dad aren’t here to bug me, and another thing: I can totally pull anything over Clover.”

  “Val. Clover’s our chaperone.”

  “Whatever, she’s shorter than both of us! I know what we’ve got to do, Franny. We’ve got to get dressed up and hit the town and meet some men.”

  I didn’t want to let on in front of Val, but the truth was, the whole idea kind of embarrassed me. I got shy even just talking to boys at school.

  “Enough of that, Val,” I said. “Come on, let’s look around up here before Clover gets back.”

  The bathroom was all white, or rather antique white, with chipping white-painted furniture and more of those brown-and-white diamond parquet floors. I had never seen so many beauty products in one bathroom and all with the most delicate hand-printed wrappings and labels. White Almond Talcum Powder. Hyacinth & Bluebell Bubble Bath. Bars of French soap: Mielle, Violette, Pepins de Raisins, Fleur d’Orange.

  We were so busy looking at the beauty products that it took us a while to notice that there were French doors leading outside.

  “Does Clover have her own balcony?” said Valentine. “Jealous.”

  By now, Carlo had gotten off the bed and was following us, waddling across the parquet floor.

  “Oh, Carlo,” I said, and scooped his silky green body into the palm of my hand while Valentine twisted the doorknob.

  And then we were outside. It wasn’t a balcony, it was a whole roof-deck, a secret roof-deck.

  “Oh my God,” said Valentine, “Clover was keeping this from us? I hate her.”

  “Quiet. She might be back at any minute.”

  I haven’t been to Italy yet, but that’s what this roof-deck felt like to me—like being in Italy. Having a—what was the name of Clover’s toenail polish again?—Italian Love Affair. There were all these fancy terra-cotta pots that held geraniums and lavender and even lemons, these tiny lemons with thin crinkly skins, not like the big beautiful juicy ones we have in California. But still! Lemons. Lemons growing on a roof-deck, here in New York City! The floor of the roof-deck was covered in green-and-white tiles, some of which were missing so you had to be careful where you stepped. And there was a blue-greenish wrought-iron table with a couple of matching chairs. On the table, an espresso cup with the remains of Clover’s morning coffee, and a vase of dying yellow roses.

  At the foot of the table was a sculpture of a small blue swan. Its feet were ringed by different size seashells. I wondered if that was one of Clover’s sculptures.

  “Oh my God,” said Valentine, “a sofa! Sweet.”

  I would have called it a love seat, though if I had, Valentine would have said: “Who are you trying to sound like? Clover?” So I didn’t. Anyway, it was under a canopy of white muslin and it was green, green velvet. Imagine, just imagine it, lying on a velvet sofa in the middle of New York City.

  No, not in the middle of New York City, on top of New York City! Here we were, on the seventeenth floor of this huge apartment building.

  “Let’s check out the view,” I said, and so we did, leaning over the railing as far and as long as we could, taking in the blue and green and red brick sweep of the city, how beautiful it was and all ours, ours to explore.

  “Oh my God, look!” exclaimed Val, pointing.

  “What?”

  “That couple is totally making out!”

  “Where?” After I said it, I was embarrassed by the quickening of my voice. I shouldn’t have given away my excitement quite so easily.

  “There, on that roof-deck, the one with the geraniums, the pink geraniums, see.”

&nbs
p; I looked, searching for the pink of the geraniums, and finally found it. Val was right: a couple was lying in each other’s arms and kissing on a blue deck chair. It was a wonderful artificial blue, the blue of a swimming pool, and the two of them looked so happy on this summer afternoon. I noticed a pitcher of pink lemonade on the table next to them and pointed this out to Val.

  “You’re not supposed to be paying attention to pink lemonade, Franny,” she said. “You’re supposed to be paying attention to what they’re doing.”

  “But they’re just—kissing.”

  “Kissing goes other places,” said Val darkly.

  5

  Lilac Gloves

  Before we went to New York, Dad gave us this speech about the importance of making the most of our time in the city. Go see the Statue of Liberty, he said. Make sure you get to Rockefeller Center. Don’t miss the Whitney. It’s time you learned something about modern art. How about we get you girls tickets to a Broadway show? He was disappointed that the Metropolitan Opera wasn’t in town for the summer or he would have loved getting us tickets.

  “Edward,” said Mom. “Don’t worry about it so much. I want you girls to have a wonderful time in the city and just be.”

  And then she smiled at us, a little sadly, I thought at the time.

  It turned out that Valentine enjoyed being a tourist much better than I did. She wanted to do all the things Dad said we should do, and in those first few weeks I went with her, and we had fun.

  I think Mom and Dad had this idea that Clover would take us on activities all around the city. After all, Theo had described her as our “chaperone,” and that sounded like what a chaperone was supposed to do with her young charges. But actually Clover wasn’t big on activities, or not on pre-planned ones anyway. We learned that there were a couple of reasons for this. One was that during the daytime, as Theo had explained to us in her letter, Clover was supposed to be working in her studio. The other reason was that Theo—and therefore Clover herself—didn’t do activities.

  Clover explained this to us by saying:

  “The first time I went to Paris, I think I must have been, oh, ten years old. As soon as we got there, the first thing Theo did was assign us code names for the visit. We needed French names, see. So she named herself Jacqueline and me Celeste. And then I’ll never forget her saying to me, ‘Don’t think we’re going to the Eiffel Tower, young lady. Don’t think we’re going to see the Notre Dame Cathedral. Here’s what I like to do when I travel, see. I like to pretend that I live in the place I’m going. I find a favorite café to have my coffee in the morning and once you have that, the rest just falls into place.’”