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Go-Go Boots

L
ee and I celebrated our fifteenth wedding anniversary in London. He said I could pick out any present (within reason) and I selected a pair of brown leather lace-up ankle boots at Emma Hope, in Notting Hill. Hope designed Keira Knightley's shoes for
Pride and Prejudice
and her tagline—“regalia for feet”—conjures up a festive regency ball. Though my boots weren't silk or velvet, or embellished with tassels or appliqués, with their small tapered heel and elongated toe, they had a distinct Victorian charm that meant the world to me.

Hope, who opened her first shop when she was only twenty-five, fell in love with vintage pieces, scouring flea markets for items she could revive and rework. She's often said that she finds her inspiration in “granny's closet,” a phrase that resonated with me because, even though both my grandmothers died before I was born, I've often drawn inspiration from them too.

For years my father kept a small sepia photograph of his mother on his bureau. I'd always admired it. She has lovely blue eyes, a straight nose, and thick brown hair piled on top of her head in the “Gibson girl” style. He rarely speaks about her, and even though I've spent my life posing questions to strangers, I intuited from an early age that she was off-limits. She died too young, and it was simply too painful, and yet I see my father in her eyes and I see myself in them too.

My maternal grandmother, Bumpa's wife, lived until her late sixties, yet she was even more of a mystery. My mother didn't have much to say about her, and I can only chalk it up to my mother's reluctance to ask questions. Her curiosity mainly extended to pets. She was crazy about them and knew the names of all the neighbors' animals. Her greatest hope was that I'd write a children's book about dogs or cats, though she was leaning toward cats.

“You're so imaginative,” she said. “It's too bad you're wasting your time with all this other stuff.”

The “other stuff” was a successful journalism career, but I'd learned not to take her comments personally. “I think you could write a wonderful story about a group of magical cats with human characteristics,” she'd once advised.

I told her that was a ridiculous idea, and then
Cats
came along and my mother said she couldn't listen to Betty Buckley sing “Memories” without thinking of all the royalties we could have split.

Every time I tried to steer her away from four-legged creatures toward my two-legged grandmother, she'd draw a total blank. “I wasn't nosy like you,” she said. “In those days, we were brought up to be polite.”

“So you can't even describe her?”

“She was an excellent seamstress.”

“And?”

“A devout Catholic.”

“That's it?”

“Oh, and she had thinning hair and wore what they used to call a rat to plump it up.”

“You paint such a fascinating portrait.”

“I'm sorry, but we all can't live your fascinating life.”

The only problem with my mother's vague description was that at one point, my grandmother did indeed live a fascinating life. On the top shelf of Bumpa's closet, I discovered three frayed photo albums that provided a rich if cryptic visual biography. My grandmother brought them to New York from her native London, where, in 1903, she'd embarked on a seven-year journey around the world. For someone who'd once considered Cape Cod the Phuket of Greater Boston, I treated the albums as if they were tales from
The
Arabian Nights
. Only there weren't any tales—just pictures of my grandmother, a tall, dark-haired woman with a penchant for big hats and a collection of fabulous shoes. One pair was particularly gorgeous: white Louis-heeled court shoes with little bows. Her shoe collection took her everywhere—India, Egypt, Japan, Hong Kong, China, Burma, Thailand, the Caribbean, Washington, New York, Newport, and, finally, Andover. She traveled by ocean liner, horse, camel, and oxcart, posing next to Japanese geishas, the Great Buddha in Kamakura, near battleships in Vancouver, the Palace of the Winds in Jaipur, the Great Sphinx in Giza. For years I made up my own story about her life. Depending on what I was reading, she was an adventuress like Gertrude Bell, a maharajah's mistress, a British spy, the grand duchess Anastasia. Some pictures had been ripped out of the albums, but since they'd been glued onto the page, the perpetrator had left behind remnants. From what I could tell, the pictures had been of a man. A lover? A first husband?

Somehow en route to New York, my grandmother lost her steamer trunk and arrived at Ellis Island with only the things she carried with her. Among them was a gold trinket in the shape of a shoe. Victorians often exchanged miniature shoes in leather or pottery. It was a symbol of a contented, prosperous life. Did she view it as a good luck charm? A fertility symbol? Or a reminder that she loved shoes? My mother kept it in a small curio cabinet in the basement, next to a Ping-Pong table nobody ever used. She was very possessive of the few things in it, though she rarely looked at them. One day I slipped the shoe trinket into my pocket and brought it back with me to New York, where I placed it on a delicate gold chain. It symbolized all the places I'd been and the ones I still wanted to see.

With my new Emma Hope boots, I began to wander like a tourist through my grandmother's life. Lee had several meetings, so I used the time to do a little digging at various research centers in London. Since I already knew her childhood address from the Ellis Island website, I took the tube to Great Titchfield Street, in Marylebone.
So this is where your grand adventure began
, I thought, walking past rows of redbrick Victorian houses. When I reached her block, there were no more charming houses, just a hideous modern building. My grandmother's address was now the Winchester Club, where a sign advertised a
MEMBERS ONLY
party:
SUMMER SNAC
KS, BLACKJACK, AND THE
MALIBU GIRLS GROOVI
NG THE NIGHT AWAY
.

A man came out and saw me taking notes. “Looking for someone?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “My grandmother.”

He looked skeptical. “In
here
?”

After more research, I discovered that my grandmother had been a lady's maid to several socially prominent women whose husbands were in politics, both in England and the United States. My grandmother's career as a domestic was the last thing my mother wanted to hear and she told me that if I'd stuck to cats, none of this would have come to light. Still, I persisted and discovered something I hoped she'd find interesting: In addition to being Irish and English, we were also part French.

“Your great-grandmother's name was Eugénie Sherrier,” I announced proudly. “She married Alphonse Rousset, and they had a daughter named Lucie—your grandmother.”

“Did Alphonse have an interesting career?” she asked.

“He worked as a glazier.”

My mother turned up her nose. “What's that?”

After I explained that it was somebody who installed glass, she said, “Like a construction worker?”

“But listen, your grandmother Lucie was a midwife. In another era, she might have been a doctor.”

“But she wasn't,” my mother said. “So for all your snooping, you've unearthed a construction worker, a midwife, and a maid. I thought you said this was going to be interesting.”

“I think it is.”

“Interesting would be if Eugénie had been Empress Eugénie.”

“I think we'd know it if your mother had been married to Napoleon III,” I said.

“You never know.”

“I would.”

“Oh, right, you know everything. You're French.”

Apart from their annual two-week vacation at the beach, my parents rarely went anywhere. They'd been out of the country only once, for their honeymoon in Quebec.

Over the years, I've been fortunate to travel for work and pleasure, and when I thought of my mother in my Manolo Blahnik wedding shoes, I realized that she yearned for the excitement and freedom the shoes represented. Her mother and daughter had traveled. Why couldn't she? But with Nancy coming along so late in their lives, and my father still paying her college tuition, expensive vacations were out of the question.

But then something wonderful happened: frequent-flyer miles. Unlike now, when the airlines make it nearly impossible to cash them in, at one point, they were like free money. Lee traveled a lot for business, and since we couldn't use all the miles he'd accumulated, we transferred them to my parents. Once we even gave them the highly coveted “Anywhere in the World” award, hoping they'd take full advantage and pick some distant exotic place. With a choice of anywhere in the world, my mother chose Disney World.

“It's not a real world,” I explained. “It's a fantasy world.”

“What's wrong with that?” she asked.

“Nothing, except this is a big award, and you might as well go someplace really far away.”

“Disney World is far away. It's where dreams are born.”

“You're thinking of Neverland.”

“Which I can see at Disney World.”

So my parents went to Disney World, and my mother, having whetted her appetite for foreign countries at Epcot, was ready to broaden her horizons. They went to London; they went to Italy twice; they toured Ireland, once with us to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary. By then, they were such old hands that after they finished unpacking at our hotel in Connemara, they went to the bar for a predinner drink. We found them talking to a couple who just happened to live two floors above us in our New York apartment building. “Small world,” my mother said, even though hers kept expanding.

When they were nearly eighty, my parents went to Paris. My mother asked my advice on what to pack and I told her definitely no sneakers. “That's a giveaway that you're a tourist,” I said. But my mother reminded me that she
was
a tourist, and if shop clerks and waiters were fooled into thinking she was French by looking at her shoes, they'd know she wasn't the minute she opened her mouth. She had a good point. Why do we think sneakers are going to give us away as “Ugly Americans” when plenty of Parisians are walking around in them? It's true they look much better in them, and they don't wear them with shorts, athletic socks, and baseball caps, but sneakers are the least of our fashion problems.

My mother brought sneakers, along with her jeans. For years she'd hated jeans, thinking that only hippies and drug addicts wore them, and then when she reached her seventies, you couldn't get her out of them. Her favorites came from a local store named Appleseed's, which she insisted on calling Johnny Appleseed, after the legendary pioneer who planted apple trees throughout the United States. The store's motto: Classic is ageless. And indeed my mother's jeans were “classic” in that they were never in style, so they were never out of style. To call them Mom jeans would indicate that they had an unfashionable shape, when they actually had no shape at all. They were like denim sweatpants, but since she was so tall and thin, they looked cute on her.

Lee managed to get business-class tickets, which my mother kept referring to as “businessman's class.” She thought it was the height of glamour, and from then on, coach was a total comedown. After an overnight flight and no sleep, my parents spent the entire day walking around the Right Bank, before hopping on a Paris by Night Illuminations bus tour. My mother had the best time of her life. She loved the city's architecture. She loved the fashion. She didn't love the food because she's a picky eater but loved that she lost five pounds. She bought herself a pair of knockoff Chanel ballet flats and me an illustrated children's book on cats—
Le Livre du Pays des Chats.

In the 1990s, we rented a series of summer homes in East Hampton, where my parents would always spend a week. My mother loved the Hamptons and urged us to buy a house before prices rose too high. “You'll regret it,” she said, “like you did with
Cats
.”