“Lovely.” Val imitated my voice, and I couldn’t help but notice how young she made me sound. “You’d think a chaperone could get something going for us, instead of being at her studio all day. Why—I’m bored. I’ve never been so bored in all my life!”
The way Valentine said the word bored, curling her lips, was almost convincing, but only almost. I knew she was just trying to get a reaction out of me.
“You know something else?” she went on. “She never takes us anywhere new, do you notice that? Everywhere we go has been around for, like, ever and ever.” She groaned.
“Well—she learned everything she knows from Aunt Theo…”
“Who’s an old lady. That’s what I’m saying! When we get back home, I want to be able to tell my friends we did things that were cool.” For a second, Val’s face went very dark and serious, just for effect. Then it brightened right up again. “Let’s—go to Rockefeller Center!” she said. “Come on, let’s go right now.”
“No thanks, Val.”
“But, Franny, I’m bored, I’m so bored I could—”
“I know, but Rockefeller Center’s just not my thing,” I said. I liked how disdainful it sounded. Just not my thing.
“Oh please,” said Valentine. “Don’t forget, Franny, you’re younger than me.”
So while Valentine was off swanning about Rockefeller Center, I stayed home and did something I had been meaning to do ever since we got to New York, which was read Theo’s novel, Made in Paris. I went and lay on my twin bed and read the whole thing in one afternoon.
Here is what I could make of it.
There’s this heroine, Angelica Randall, not to be called under any circumstances Angie. She’s from this big family in Boston that has its own island, called Cranberry Cliff, somewhere around the Cape Cod area. Angelica’s brothers and sisters and cousins are always off playing tennis and drinking gin and tonics. Or sometimes they drink martinis.
Angelica goes to this stuffy all-girls school, called Winters, with an old-maid headmistress, Miss Shattuck, who doesn’t approve when Angelica refuses to play volleyball and tries to get other girls to refuse too. You’re warned, Angelica, Miss Shattuck tells her. Then Angelica invites an eighteen-year-old sailor, Tony, to a school dance. (She doesn’t call it a “prom.”) So then Miss Shattuck expels her from Winters, which is a big disgrace because the women in her family have gone to Winters forever. Her father sends her to a boarding school in Virginia, which she says is “a very boring, very green state where all the girls are just crazy about horses. I am not crazy about horses.”
I guess getting expelled from Winters wasn’t too terrible, because she gets into Radcliffe anyway. And that’s where she starts having a ton of boyfriends. But a lot of Harvard guys are boring, and good, she says, for only one thing. But then things get serious with a dark-eyed poet named Clay Claverly, whose last name is the name of a building at Harvard, so “even Mummy and Daddy will approve of him.” Angelica steals his black turtlenecks and wears them around campus with her plaid skirts, and she and Clay are always smoking and kissing in public, at a hangout called the Blue Parrot.
But then Angelica gets pregnant. I was thinking they’d get married they were so in love, but you don’t have a novel unless something goes wrong. So before you know it they’ve fallen out of love, and Angelica doesn’t want to have a baby anyway. She gets a procedure, which of course is an abortion.
Then she goes to Paris.
One day, she’s just sitting in a cafe when a man asks her if she’s ever done any modeling. She says no, but she’s up for anything. And she is: she goes to a wild party at a chateau in the countryside. She cross-dresses: “Turns out I look just dashing in a tux.” But then one day when the chestnut trees are shedding and winter is coming, she gets a letter from her father’s lawyer saying: Come back to Boston or I won’t give you any more money.
You don’t know, when the book ends, whether Angelica will go back to Boston or stay in Paris or what. You just know that she’s had all these experiences and lived, the way Val said we were going to “live” this summer in New York.
When Val got home, I gave her the novel, figuring she’d want to read it. But Val only rolled her eyes and said: “But, Franny, you just told me most of the plot yourself! And anyway—I don’t know, Aunt Theodora is so old!” She glanced at the photograph of her on the cover, wearing those long lilac gloves. She read aloud from the back flap: “‘Theodora Bell is a Radcliffe graduate and former model. Made in Paris is her first novel.’ Hmm. Do you think she was ever really young?”
“Well of course, Val!” I exclaimed. “Just look at the picture.”
“Well. Put it another way. Do you think we’ll ever be really old?”
That evening, Clover took us to dinner at the cute little Italian restaurant down the street, and I asked her something I had been wondering about more and more: “What is Aunt Theo doing in Germany?”