Valentine’s Day: The Girl in the Red Velvet Dress

A few days ago when I was poking in one of my closets, I found a battered old scrapbook from the 1930s. The woman to whom it had belonged—I have no idea who that was, but certainly it was a woman—had pasted onto the scrapbook’s yellowish pages a big collection of greeting cards. A later hand had snatched a lot of them out, leaving bare, past-stained spaces. But enough remained to show that the original collection had been largely Christmas cards of the old-fashioned kind: sleighs in the snow, Christmas vigils, candles and evergreens, with old-fashioned sentimental wishes printed above an indecipherable name. They seemed to be addressed to a number of relatives. She’d included photographs of those redoubtable monarchs, Queen Mary and King George V, which made me wonder if the collector might have been British. But no: the cards could only have been printed in the U.S. where many citizens still admire or even worship the British monarchy.

So, Valentine’s Day. In the mountains here, a surprise few days of warmth is melting the snow on the heights, the skiers are in the full flush of enthusiasm as they roar up to the ski basin, and somewhere someone is giving somebody chocolates and roses and a probably humorous card.

The only Valentines that ever meant anything to me were the ones I punched out of a twenty-five-cent book when I was in the fifth grade. I was deeply embedded in my girls’ school and my classmates were really my first and possibly my only loves. So I added sentimental wishes on each of the cards, targeted to the recipient; I didn’t know any boys. Being still unaware of post offices and stamps, I gave the cards to my mother to mail.

She read my overblown sentimental best wishes and told me I couldn’t send them to my classmates; maybe she bought others for me to send instead. I sensed under her granite disapproval something that seemed to me to be fear, a fear I would encounter several other times as I grew up. Her fear governed parts of my life: I had to have a single room in my Freshman dormitory, making it difficult for me to make friends, and any relation with another young woman aroused her suspicions. Many years later, I thought that her uncomfortable relationship with her sister-in-law, openly lesbian at a time when this was still considered by many to be an aberration, had sparked her distrust of all female friendship. The injuries all women sustain in the area of romance are inflicted, usually, by men—but that did not alarm her. Something hidden and powerful in friendships between women did.

So it was with bemused bewilderment that I read a long-ago college classmate’s recollection of a Christmas dance at the Plaza Hotel in New York followed by a carriage ride in snowy Central Park. I don’t remember any of this, possibly it never happened. He was most impressed by his memory of my red velvet dress. It’s difficult to put these scraps together to make some kind of Valentine’s Day message.

One of the best things that has happened to me in my long life are my friendships with women: my sister, my college friend who calls me every month, the women who came to my talk on Isak Dinesen’s gleaming short story, “Babett’s Feast,” and later appreciated the movie, one of the few I know that actually honors and even transforms the literary source. These are the friendships I’ll honor this year, imagining a card that celebrates the fidelity and trustworthiness of women.

And there’s nothing sexual about it, except that all life displays the glow of that kind of intensity but with women, there is less cruelty and betrayal.

In Women Valentine's Day