“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.”