Sublime

It’s terrible for a mother to ask herself that question about her own daughter, a girl of twenty. But I couldn’t talk to anyone about it; Riccardo and Michele would react violently. Men always say, “You’ll be sorry if my daughter, you’ll be sorry if my sister …” They say, “I won’t tolerate it.” It’s easy to say “I won’t tolerate it.” Yet things hap

"Mother of Mike, boys—what Gorgeous Girls! To climb like that! to run like that! and afraid of nothing. This country suits me all right. Let's get ahead."

—Charlotte Clingstone presented a kind of ideal. She was bohemian but accomplished. Worldly but rooted.

The house was large and deeply lived-in, all the shelves and surfaces stacked with books and boxes, framed pictures, old greeting cards set up like tent cities. If there was a spectrum of spaces defined at one end by my barren apartment, this marked the other extreme. Every single surface told a story. A long one. With digressions.

The super-duplex, with its shared houses and unusual layout, mirrored the unusual layout of the Padavanos, or what was left of them. Sylvie and her sisters and William had built their own lives to suit themselves, to serve the size and shape they occupied.

Anouk couldn’t have come from a more different family. Raised in the affluent town of Le Vésinet, in the suburbs of Paris, she went to boarding school and spent her summers in Saint-Tropez, driving on a motorcycle with her friends, sometimes wearing nothing but shoes. When they retired, her parents moved to a beautiful house in Burgundy.

Another woman I worked with, an intelligent and gifted woman, told me of her grandmother, who lived in the Midwest. Her grandmother’s idea of a really good time was to board the train to Chicago and wear a big hat, and walk down Michigan Avenue looking in all the shop windows and being an elegant lady. By hook or by crook or by fate, she married a