“Oh!” exclaimed Clover. “Carnival of the Animals, you mean. Delicious!”
Julian’s string quartet was playing at an event at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Clover says that’s a very prestigious organization that goes way, way back, and in order to be a member you have to be a famous author or musician or painter. It’s in this big old mansion all the way up in Harlem, right on the edge of Riverside Drive, on a street that goes down to the water. When we got there, the light falling over the river was very beautiful, and I remarked to Val, “You know how sometimes you can forget that Manhattan is actually an island?”
“I never really thought about it,” said Val.
“Well, I just did,” I explained, “because being here I really remembered. It’s like getting—I don’t know—a whiff of the ocean.”
“The ocean? Really, Franny?”
“It’s just … in the air,” I said. Sounding rather knowing and mysterious, I hoped.
We were dressed just the opposite of each other tonight. I had on my black linen dress and the black velvet bow in my hair. But Val meanwhile was dressed very simply—at Clover’s suggestion—in a long white cotton dress. And around her red curls she wore the soft, floaty green chiffon scarf she got at that vintage store in the Village. I thought the two of us must have looked just elegant walking up the broad steps of the Academy. Val’s dress looked practically Grecian, the length and the sweep of it.
Also, we were decades younger than everyone else who was there. These people were old. A lot of the men wore bow ties and the women did their hair in these big upsweeps with Victorian-looking tortoiseshell combs.
Inside the building, there was this grand staircase and these cozy libraries and galleries full of famous paintings.
“See,” Val whispered to me. “Pretty ritzy. Julian was telling me that, like, Jackie O used to come to this event back when she was alive.”
Our names were on the guest list. We got to wear name tags saying “Franny Lord” and “Valentine Lord” written out in this lovely black cursive. I vowed right away to save mine afterward—it would be a memento from the summer.
Julian’s string quartet played in a cool white room on the top floor. We watched them set up while the room filled with people. There he was—Julian, and wearing a tuxedo too! I had to give Val credit: he was handsome, the dark, the distinguished, living-in-New-York-City classical musician. The girls in the quartet wore black cocktail dresses.
Once everyone was seated, the president of the Academy got up and introduced the quartet. Apparently he was a famous poet, though naturally we’d never heard of him. He was this funny-looking little man, but interesting, with a purple ascot and his arm in a sling. The ascot and the sling just seemed to go together somehow, like they were parts of a costume. I mean, it was hard to imagine the poet not wearing the sling, even once his arm got healed.
After rambling on for a while about the Academy and its members and which ones had died this past year and blah blah blah, he said a few words about Julian’s quartet and the piece they were going to play.
“We’re going to hear the Swan movement from the Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Sa?ns,” the poet said, caressing the word swan. A sigh swept through the audience. “I know, I know,” he said. “It will take you back to your childhood, it will make you melt.”
I couldn’t help but notice that when he was playing, Julian stared right at Valentine, right into her eyes. Nobody had ever looked into my eyes like that, but then, I reminded myself, I was only fourteen: surely somebody would someday. But then, the more they played, and as the music swelled, my thoughts got carried away. You know how music can bring up the strangest emotions? Well, suddenly I had this flash. And the flash said: I will never be young again.
After the quartet was finished playing, everyone went downstairs and sat down to dinner in the library. There was endive salad with blue cheese and Bartlett pears, followed by beef Wellington, which is beef and buttery mushrooms in a pastry shell, so pretty much the height of luxury. I found myself seated between the wife of the president of Juilliard, who didn’t speak to me much, and a cranky old nature essayist and biographer who did. He was nearly blind and needed my help identifying the food on his plate. Val wouldn’t have helped him, or she would have acted a little put out if she did. Val’s not so big on old people, but I like them, and I liked the nature essayist, in spite of his being a little on the cranky side. He was wearing a suit, like all the other men here, but the difference was he had on a hunting cap with a very striking green feather in it. It wasn’t a playful, delicate feather, like you might see on a ladies’ hat. It was a very masculine feather. I asked him to tell me about it.
“Oh, this,” he said. “From the Texas Green Kingfisher. A fan sent it to me once. That was back in—let’s see—1967, I think it was.”