Epilogue

Boucher’s Seasons

Three years later I’m visiting New York City again.

Now, at seventeen, I’ve come East to look at schools; my first choice is Sarah Lawrence. I thought of going to Bennington, like Clover, but I just don’t think I could stand being in Vermont. I’m still a city girl. I also came to New York to visit Val, who is now a junior at Barnard.

Val is dating someone new—she’s always dating someone new, or so it seems to me—and I have a boyfriend back in San Francisco I met at music camp. After that summer in New York, our parents sent us straight back to that camp—no more adventures for a while. But something had happened to me that summer and forever afterward I knew I didn’t want to be a singer; after coming back from New York, I wanted to be a writer. What had happened to Valentine eventually happened to me. I filled out, rejected the pixie cut Clover had insisted I get that summer, and grew my hair long again. Even if it is not quite as “sophisticated” long, Teddy—my boyfriend—likes running his fingers through it, and I’m at the age where things like that are much more important to me.

Anyway, after that summer in New York, I kept on “taking notes.” Sometimes when I think back to that summer, it seems like all the big things that happened happened not to me but to Valentine, and I suppose in a way they did. But then I remember something that Clover once told us, that afternoon at the Frick, that “a true Romantic knows that the inner life is the thing, the only thing that really matters, in the end.” If that’s true—that the inner life is the only thing that matters—then everything I remember about that summer will always play a big part in mine. I remember Clover telling us that happiness is the most fragile thing in the world.

And as for my sister, Valentine—but how am I to know about Valentine? What started to happen that summer is finally complete. We’re not close anymore. You can still spend time with someone—you can still have a lot of fun with them, even—without being close. Being close is different.

In her will, Aunt Theo left us a modest amount of money, which we can use once we’re twenty-one. It isn’t a lot of money. Clover said she wanted us to think of it as traveling money, for us to go off and have some adventures with. She said Aunt Theo believed in the necessity of women leading “large lives.” Aunt Theo also left me her book collection. She left Valentine that nude portrait of her that was painted one morning in Paris when she was a young woman and the red satin Lanvin ballet pumps she used to do the tango in, after learning from Clover that they wore the same shoe size. And Valentine actually wears them sometimes, not caring if they get ruined. If they were mine, I wouldn’t wear them ever. But that’s the difference between Valentine and me.

Valentine hasn’t gone on the stage. She’s an art history major; she’s doing her thesis on Boucher’s Seasons, which we first saw at the Frick with Clover that summer. Clover? We don’t see or hear much from Clover anymore. After Aunt Theo died, she left Clover most of her money, including her apartment in the Village. But last I heard she had sold the apartment and was living abroad, out of her orange Hermès suitcase. She used to send us postcards sometimes, then they petered out. Oh, but I’m lying. We used to write back but then one day we stopped. We got swept up in our own lives.

We got swept back up also into the modern world. It was as if, once we left Aunt Theo’s apartment, we shed some kind of magical golden skin that had protected us. When we left there, the edges of things just never felt quite so soft ever again.

And another thing: I never write real letters to anyone anymore, though I miss them. There was also a time after we went back to San Francisco when Alexander and I wrote postcards, and I kept the ones he sent me and showed them to all my friends. They were very impressed because hardly anybody sends real mail anymore. But then we stopped and all that seems a long time ago now.

And Val? Well, absolutely everybody calls Val Valentine at this point. She always wears her hair pinned up and it isn’t so bright red anymore anyway—it’s more like what you’d call auburn. And another thing is when I look at her now I no longer think that her eyes are violet. I see what Mom means about them being just plain dark blue. Which makes me wonder, actually, about a lot of things, a lot of other things I might have gotten wrong, might have made more otherworldly and fabulous than they actually ever were. Or does it? Was I so very wrong? Because it also makes me think of that incredibly hot, bright green afternoon when Clover and I strolled through Central Park and went to see Calder’s Circus at the Whitney—and how Calder’s Circus freezes some of that preciousness in miniature: how when you look at it you could be a child again, you could believe that your beautiful older sister’s eyes were really and truly the color violet. Violet is still one of my favorite words.

These days, if you saw Valentine on the street, you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that she was born in Paris; she has something of the Continental air. I don’t know how she did it, but she has turned into the sort of woman who knows how to tie a scarf and understands the allure of silence.

Woman, not girl. She’s the kind of twenty-year-old you’d take for twenty-five.

One day after hanging out in Valentine’s dorm room, we decided to take the subway downtown. We got off in the Village, not far from the building on Lower Fifth where Aunt Theo’s old apartment used to be. It was so strange to think of that apartment existing without her. What had happened to the secret roof-deck, the terra-cotta pots, and the lemon trees? We stopped at Caffe Reggio—we take our coffee black now but can’t resist the opportunity to have it piled high with whipped cream if it’s available—and then decided to go and walk around the Village. It was one of those fall days in Manhattan when everyone is so grateful that the heat has lifted that it’s as if the whole city experiences this brief, collective happiness.

“That summer,” said Valentine. “Can you believe that we actually weren’t allowed to wear jeans that summer? It just seems so incredible to think of now!”

“Trousers,” I said, remembering. “Clover specifically said that Aunt Theo didn’t care for women in trousers.”

“Trousers!” squealed Valentine. “Trousers!” It had been years since we had heard that word. We laughed and laughed just at the thought of it.

“That summer…” said Valentine again, and there was something a little serious about her voice when she said this, and I wondered what was coming. Revelations, I thought.

“What about that summer?” I asked, in a different tone of voice myself.

“Well, it wasn’t only first love I learned about that summer.” She blushed, and now that she’s all grown up it’s not like Valentine to blush. Then she asked me: “Oh, Franny. You never even guessed?”

“Guessed what?”

She threw her hands up in the air. She said once again: “Oh, Franny. My father.”

It was years since we had mentioned him. I could barely remember the way, when we were still little girls, we used to make up all those bedtime stories about him.

“What about your father?” I said now.

“Why, he came to that party, on the night Aunt Theo died. He came all the way from Paris because Clover invited him. Clover knew, see. That he was my father. Wasn’t that thoughtful of her? She wanted us to finally meet.”

I felt almost betrayed—only almost—that Clover had never told me, when all this time I’d thought I was so much closer to Clover that summer than Valentine was. Also, I was disappointed I hadn’t guessed any of this, when I thought of myself as being so much more observant than Val. Now it seemed that I hadn’t been quite so observant on the night of that party after all.

“Laurent Victoire,” she said. “The man who was there from Paris.”

“Oh,” I said, remembering, “he was the one who painted L’heure de la lavande that was over her bed.”

“Yes,” said Valentine. “Before he fell in love with Mom, years, years before, he was in love with Theo.”

“Everybody was,” I said.

“Yes, I guess so. But Mom met him through Aunt Theo, in fact. The two of them had stayed friends. But it was Theo, Clover said, who took care of Mom and me when I was born. Theo bought me all these fancy French baby clothes, remember.”

I remembered. I remembered them because after Mom moved to San Francisco and married Dad and I was born, she dressed me in Valentine’s French baby clothes. She still has some of those clothes, even now.

“You know,” Valentine went on. “Mom told me she still dreams of that apartment sometimes.”

“What apartment?”

“The apartment in Paris. Laurent’s. It must have been the same one where he painted Aunt Theo, I think. She says it was very beautiful, the most beautiful apartment she was ever inside of in all her life. She says it was rose-colored. Rose,” repeated Valentine with a sigh, to give emphasis to the image.

And I saw in my imagination a rose-colored Parisian apartment. It was as if I had been there before, in another life, and that made sense because my mother had.

I didn’t feel hurt or angry that Val had known more than I did. No, the main thing I felt was: curious.

“Who knows? Maybe he’ll invite me to stay in that apartment in Paris someday…” Valentine was saying now.

Life is so rich, I thought to myself. It was so rich that you missed out on things even when you thought you were so good at paying attention. For some reason after I had this thought, I wanted to go back to Val’s dorm room and start writing down a new story. There were so many stories I wanted to tell and I was excited about all of them.

I’m happy, I thought, and told myself to try to remember this moment before it was gone. This is what Clover meant.

Then all of a sudden, there we were standing in the park just in front of the Washington Square Arch, near the same spot where we used to go and have picnics sometimes, when a man stopped us and asked Valentine: “Excuse me. Are you a ballerina?”

I didn’t blame him for thinking it. Val was wearing a black cashmere pullover and pony-skin slippers, and then there’s something about the way she stands these days. She’s grown into her legs and she’s not as jumpy, not as expressive, as before.

Val paused. What she said surprised me: “I was.”

The man said: “Oh. Thought so. Are you dancing in anything now?”

Then Val laughed lightly and said: “No. I meant I was a ballerina years, years ago.”

“When?” the man said. He leaned toward her; I think it was her air of slight sadness that captured him.

“One summer,” said Val. “One beautiful summer.”

And heads held high we both walked on, through the Arch, into that rich and marvelous New York City light.