“Dead,” Valentine repeated, “she’s dead,” just to be as dramatic as possible. Clover reached out and patted her head.
“I guess this won’t be so much of a Getting to Know You party after all,” Clover managed to say between her tears. I wasn’t crying yet, and I wondered why that should be; I wondered if other people would be looking at me, wondering why I wasn’t. Thinking I was heartless, maybe. But it wasn’t that I was heartless. It wasn’t that at all. Valentine and I had never been close to anybody who had died before, and the funny thing was that even though I had never actually met Aunt Theo in real life, I did feel close to her. I was confident that I had felt closer to her than Valentine, even though she was the one who was sobbing while I was sitting there on my Madeline bed perfectly still.
Clover went on: “I did so want for Aunt Theo to get to meet you and Valentine. But, otherwise, I thought of it more as a Nice to Have Known You party, if you see what I mean. Goodbye, farewell—oh, the point of having this party was to bring all of Aunt Theo’s friends back together one last time! She’d been resting up all summer long, hoping that she would be well enough to come to New York in August. The last time I spoke to her was just two days ago, in fact. She sounded quite well, I had no idea it was so near the end. But now I wonder—I wonder, Franny. That was just like Aunt Theo. She always believed in acting all chin up, even at the worst of times.”
Clover decided that everybody should know what had happened. Why keep it from Aunt Theo’s friends, when so many of them were right there? Before she did this, Clover went and “consulted,” as she put it, with Cousin Honor. She said that was because Cousin Honor was the only blood relative of Aunt Theo’s there. The two of them agreed it would be best to go ahead and break the news to the group. Afterward there were tears and toasts. Cousin Honor chimed in, saying that we were to “open another bottle of champagne if you please and carry on.”
“Carry on doing what?” demanded Valentine.
“Why,” said Cousin Honor bravely, though there were tears in her eyes as well, “for instance we could do the tango!”
“The tango?” Valentine repeated.
Cousin Honor was small, but she reminded me somehow of a queen. She just had that air. (“Imperious,” Ellery whispered to me. “Honor was always imperious. Just like her cousin Theo.”) I watched her, fascinated. Clover and I exchanged glances, wondering if she actually could be serious about us doing the tango at a time like this. Turned out, she was.
“Warren?” she said grandly, putting her hand out to him and leading him in the first dance. Clover shrugged and went to search for some appropriate music to put on among Aunt Theo’s old records.
At Cousin Honor’s prompting, Alexander and I even tried to do the tango together, though we were not very good at it, either of us. And we were blushing the whole time.
Meanwhile, Valentine did the tango with Laurent Victoire, the auburn-haired Frenchman, who selected her as his dancing partner especially, and who, unlike Alexander and me, turned out to be very, very good at it. By the end of it, Valentine was pretty good at it too, though she did keep bursting into tears every now and then and exclaiming “Dead, she’s dead,” as if anyone could have forgotten. It wasn’t that we had forgotten. It’s that we were trying to do what Aunt Theo would have wanted: not to let on. To act chin up, even at the worst of times.
23
That Was the Summer When
Here is Aunt Theo’s obituary, which Mom and Dad clipped for us from The New York Times. We read it once we were back home in San Francisco, just a couple of days after the night of the party where we supposed to get to finally meet her.
THEODORA “THEO” WENTWORTH WHITIN BELL DIES AT 65; RADCLIFFE BEAUTY, AVEDON MODEL & NOVELIST
THEODORA “THEO” WENTWORTH WHITIN BELL, a swan-necked Radcliffe beauty, Avedon model, one-time novelist, and legendary free spirit, died in Germany after a long illness. She was sixty-five.